So you’ve survived Armageddon. You’ve gotten away from danger and you’ve eked by scrounging food. Eventually, the premade and canned food is going to run out and you’ll need to know how to fend for yourself a little bit further. The first, best thing you can learn to make to sustain yourself is bread. Bread has been a staple of the human diet since prehistoric times. It’s also simple, with very few ingredients, and easy to make.
Traditionally, bread is made with flour, water, sugar, and yeast, but it doesn’t necessarily need yeast or sugar. If you add yeast to the mix, the yeast will convert the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The alcohol will cook off when the bread is baked adding flavor to the bread. The carbon dioxide causes the dough to rise, giving your bread a light and fluffy texture.
Mix your ingredients together in a bowl of some kind until mixed all together. Knead the dough for several minutes. If you added yeast to your bread, let it rise for at least an hour before baking it.
Ideally, you’ll want an oven to bake in or, at the very least, a dutch oven. A dutch oven is a pot with a tight-fitting lid and thick walls, which causes a uniform temperature inside the pot. The main thing you need to worry about when baking bread over an open fire is temperature. Ovens are designed to cook the contents uniformly, which an open fire won’t do. It is imperative that when cooking the dough over a fire you make sure that you rotate the bread so that all of it gets baked evenly.
You can cook the dough in nearly any container, from an actual loaf pan to a coffee can. You can even wrap the dough around a stick and cook it that way! The point is, as long as you’re diligent, you can make bread to feed yourself in any environment that you can start a fire.
