Category: Cooking

Sailor Boy Pilot Bread

As I mentioned in another post, I got a little obsessed with the idea of hard tack, and that led me to Sailor Boy Pilot Bread. This is a large dense cracker product beloved by the people of Alaska, and this is my review of it.

Unobtainium

These crackers are impossible to buy in Kentucky, but I suspect they’re hard to buy anywhere outside of Alaska. The manufacturer hasn’t responded to any emails, and the phone numbers I’ve been able to find are out of service. I’m guessing they just don’t have enough customer interaction to notice, or the several recent mergers/buyouts they seem to have been part of have left them busy with other stuff.

Fortunately I know someone in Alaska who generously sent me a box to try out. I worried – am I going to fall in love with these, and I’ll be bugging this poor person forever trying to get more?

A big, bland, crumbly cracker

Box says the company wants to hear from you, but provides no address/email/social media links.

They would love to hear from you, but don't tell you how to contact them.
They would love to hear from you, but don’t tell you how to contact them.

They are a smidge over 3.5” in diameter. A bit harder than a normal cracker, denser, just as flaky. The flavor is cracker. No salt. The kind of cracker that packs itself into mortar in every tooth crevice you have.

Last month I was sick, couldn’t keep anything down, and had to have something in my gut for a pain pill. These crackers worked just fine.

They are crumbly and are prone to shatter into bits. The crumbly aspect is kind of ironic given the threat of bears & leaving food out, etc. in bear country which as we all know, Alaska is. It’s probably no more crumbly than a regular saltine, but it’s like 10 times as big so it seem worse.

It’s easy to see this cracker being a carrier for just about anything including a not-to-small cooked hamburger patty. They’re big. So whatever you’re spreading had better be up to it. Boursin cheese has an entirely different economic impact when you’re putting it on one of these.

The kind soul who sent me a box responded “I don’t think you’ve ever had hard tack” when I questioned the wisdom of sending the crackers through the mail. Well, they are pretty sturdy, but they are a long way from being as hard as hard tack. While mine faired pretty well in shipping, Amazon reviews suggest most don’t – although they’re not available on Amazon anymore.

Road Test

We took them on a 2-week road trip to some national parks because surely that would be the ideal time for them. But no, they came home untouched. To be fair most of what we brought from home came home untouched. For whatever reason, we just didn’t use the pantry stuff we had, instead eating a lot of deli meat and pasta and tacos. Heck, even some of the chips we bought on the way ended up making it home. But I digress.

Independent snack food?

The lack of salt makes them a bit unappetizing by themselves and they really need a spread or something else to get your saliva glands going. I could see how the lack of salt could be why they work well as a bread substitute, but only for people who don’t have actual bread. Of course, why else would they need a bread substitute?

Their size puts them into a different category than regular crackers, more like sandwich size meals. So snacking probably means one or at most two crackers. You needn’t worry about having an open package nearby and absent-mindedly eating them all. If you got past two you’re probably need a nap. Snackccidents with these are unlikely.

Eating as the Alaskans do

Ok so if they’re not a snack cracker, what do you do with them?

According to web searches, you put stuff on them. I tried tuna salad (ok, really just tuna fish with mayo) on one and it was good. The cracker doesn’t bring much to the party but substrate and calories (they’re 90Kcal each) so really anything would work.

People make pizza using them, tostadas and lots of other things. As Littlehousebigalaska.com puts it “You can put anything ON it, and it just works.” They even mentioned toasting & buttering them, along with crumbling them into soup or stew. I’m thinking some cinnamon sugar, butter, and a brief visit to the oven/broiler to get caramelized could be quite nice.

I haven’t tried most of these, but I plan to. More to follow!

The allure of hard tack – making a durable, edible travel biscuit

Between reading Aubrey/Maturin novels and watching Townsends videos on Youtube, I’ve developed a bit meme-lust for hard tack.

Hard tack is flour and water and salt formed into cracker or cookie shapes and baked and dried until it is basically rock-hard, and is a very durable food source used as far back as humanity has had flour, water, salt, and fire.

Why the allure? We all want food to be handy, but food so often requires a bit of care – it has to be kept from heat and cold and moisture or dryness and from being crushed. The idea of a perpetually edible, super durable, cheap to make cookie to carry while traveling or hiking camping or whatever is attractive. The vision of pulling out a small sack, fishing out a “ship’s biscuit” and having a quick snack is comforting. More so if said biscuit is made with whole, nutritious ingredients, which gives the thing that strong combination of being healthy and traditional. What could be better?

Well, based on my first experiments making this stuff, anything would be better. Hard tack is so hard it is not edible. It ain’t no cookie. I wasn’t surprised as most historical accounts I’ve seen have people using hard tack not so much a food by itself but as an ingredient in stews, soups, puddings, etc. It has to be crushed and/or soaked in liquid to be chewable.

But surely there is something nearly as hard but more edible, right? I mean, in the hundreds of years since hard tack was commonly used surely someone has developed something with most of the durability of hard tack but with a bit less fired-ceramic nature?

Enter Pilot Bread

While I was surfing around reading about hard tack recipes and looking for variations I learned about Sailor Boy Pilot Bread. Apparently this is a form of hard tack that is consumed in great quantities all over the state of Alaska, where regular bread is hard to come by. There are sites with recipes using it to make pizza, and apparently it is a delivery system for every kind of dip or spread. This is clearly more edible than actual hard tack.

Reputed to be durable, very shelf stable, and well-liked I thought I should get some and try them out. Easy thought, hard to get done. Sailor Boy Pilot Bread is hard to come by outside of Alaska. Amazon lists it, but says it is no longer available.

The company that makes Sailor Boy Pilot Bread that is listed on the package, Interbake Foods, is apparently defunct. Or maybe has become Weston foods, but their phone number is disconnected as well.

Is Interbake Foods now Weston Foods?
Is Interbake Foods now Weston Foods?

Maybe they are actually Hearthside Food Solutions (from Baking Business)

Or maybe Hearthside Food Solutions?
Or maybe Hearthside Food Solutions?

That number was dead as well, but I’ve emailed with no reply yet. And no mention anywhere of the Sailor Boy brand. Very mysterious.

Then I received this photo from a friend in Alaska:

So Weston it is! Or at least was in 2021.

While I wait for a reply from corporate America, I decided to try making my own pilot bread. I started with the recipe here: Grandpa Cooks

Attempts #1 & 2

I had doubts because the ingredients list was flour, water, salt, and baking powder – was the addition of baking powder really going to make a big difference? No it did not. Failure. Complete failure. So hard, even in a 1/8” thickness, that I was worried I’d break a tooth. Pistachio shells would be comparable, probably softer. Grandpa may cook, but not well. Or, possibly, Sailor Boy Pilot Bread is one hell of a lot harder than I’m thinking it is. No, can’t be, people eat pilot bread with salmon spread on it. It’s got to be softer.

#1 left, #2 right. Hard as rock.
#1 left, #2 right. Hard as rock.

Looking at the ingredients list for Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, available a lot of places like on Food n flavors, we see palm oil as the second ingredient. I don’t have palm oil, but I do have coconut oil, and that is a tropical oil and has pretty good shelf stability.

Attempt #3

Adding a substantial amount of coconut oil was a game changer. This result was still very hard and crisp, but chewable without risk of damaging anything. Just a smidge harder than most anything else. Bland, but that is kind of the point. I suspect this recipe is not too far off from actual Pilot Bread, except for being ugly. This recipe would serve but it might be nicer to get more leavening. And flavor, and fiber.

Attempt #4

Involved doubling the amount of baking powder with no discernible difference.

#3 left, #4 right, #4 was baked longer.
#3 left, #4 right, #4 was baked longer.

Attempt #5

Part of my plan was to incorporate whole wheat flour to add flavor and fiber, so I added 50% whole wheat flour, and upped the water the make the dough a bit softer. Attempt #5 yielded a slightly softer cracker yet with more texture and flavor, and very close to what I originally had in mind. I also started making them round rather than square, but I’m trying to decide if that is really worth the trouble. This result lacks the refinement of store-bought crackers, being a little ugly and not perfectly round and consistent, but the flavor is pretty comparable to crackers I’ve had in the past. Easily edible alone or with other things.

#5 - best so far
#5 – best so far

I’ve still got ideas for improvement, but this recipe is very promising:

75g (50% total flour weight) Unbleached bread flour

75g (50% total flour weight) Whole wheat flour

98g (65% total flour weight) Water

30g (20% total flour weight) Coconut oil

4g (2% total flour weight) Sugar

4g (2% total flour weight) Salt

4g (2% total flour weight) Baking powder

Mix everything together, knead, roll to 1/8-1/4″ or so, cut into squares/circles, poke some holes like you see in crackers, bake at 350F 20min a side. Feel free to bake longer, I’m still working out the ideal time. Thicker crackers definitely take longer.

Many folks such as civil war re-enactors or others who are concerned with historical accuracy will point out that I’m not really making hard tack any more, but instead just sort of a hard cracker. Well, that’s true. While I need it to stay edible in my pantry for perhaps months, or in my pack for a week or so, I don’t need to ship it around the world in casks or have it toted around battlefields. I’m happy to give up years of shelf life and some sturdiness in exchange for edibility.

I will continue to tweak the recipe, with future plans of adding psyllium husks to up the fiber content, increasing the size and also the thickness get closer to 100kcal, and resting the dough to improve flavor.