Here are some easy Antarctica recipes you can use to teach your kids geography and give some inspiration for cooking while you are home. Find out more about this series, or jump right in with part 5 of ‘Suppers from Around the World’ brings you easy Antarctica recipes that your family will love. Each day we will have a new continent of family dinner recipes until all 7 continents are done.
ANTARCTICA
‘Cool Antarctica’ spent two years in Antarctica and unlike anywhere else in the world they found out there are not any multi-generational recipes. Unlike other continents, food is shipped in by the country who is housing the visitor and there are no farms, vegetables or even wildlife you can eat. Foo is shipped in and prepared/stored at bases and although there are no cultural heritage dishes there are some recipes that have been come to be known as Antarctica recipes.
Since it is always cold in the Antarctica you can imagine the recipes aren’t full of fruit and delicate foods. Instead they are high fat recipes that promote energy and help keep you warm. In the Antarctic, travelers need to increase their calorie intake to survive. Don’t worry about gaining weight though, you will burn of most calories just working to stay warm. Here are traditional Antarctica recipes.
Fresh Baked Bread/Bannock
Fresh bread is good anything, not just in the Antarctic. Although it’s been a tradition to make bread on the bases for 100 years in the Antarctica, you can make it at home. One style of bread is Cool Antartica’s Bannock. Growing up in Newfoundland we learned about bannock in school and made it regularly, but we called it ‘toutans’. Bannock is a simple form of bread made with flour, salt, water, fat and baking powder. It is usually fried in butter and you can even do it traditional-style by wrapping it around a stick and cooking it over a fire.
Tip: We buy ready-made balls of pizza dough and fry them in a pan with butter and salt. Similar to ‘Beaver Tails’ they are great with toppings like maple syrup, Nutella, jam or butter. If you have a bread machine, you can just make some bread dough and use that.
Sledging Biscuit
Antarctic sledging biscuits are compact, resilient and a source of high energy calories. A staple to any Antarctic diet, these biscuits are long lasting and great smothered in butter, marmite or topped with cheese. An Antarctic tradition is to crumble them with pemmican and water to make hoosh.
Again, this is something we have similar in Newfoundland. Our Purity cream crackers are very similar and suggested to be eaten with butter.
Pemmican
As we mentioned earlier to survive in the Antarctic you need a whole lot of fat. Pemmican was originally a native American (cree) food that provides an energy book. The recipe varies, but Pemmican is a compact resilient food that traditionally was used as a way to facilitate the transportation and storage of a mixture of dried meat and fat. It may not look appetizing, but it can be mixed with a biscuit and water to make hoosh, which some say is more appealing.
If you know your kids are not going to eat Pemmican, try this Antarctic take on Beef Wellington.
Hoosh
Hoosh is claimed to be the most traditional Antarctic recipe. It’s very simple with only 3 ingredients which most people will already have. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s basically a stew made out of pemmican, sledging biscuits and ice. I have been told that it tastes better than it looks, and is known to be the reason many explorers survived. Check out Cool Antarctica hoosh recipe, which has helpful picture tutorial too.
Photo: coolantarctica.com
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