Making Bread

One of the aspects of being a long distance cruiser that “they” don't tell you about is the strange and inconsistent way in which you apply the self sufficiency mantra. Sometimes you will happily bemoan the fact that you can't get your hands on good coffee irrespective of the fact that you should have stocked up when it was available in Spain. Other times you will move heaven and earth to get hold of the wherewithal to make something that is generally available in even the remotest locations. An example of the latter is bread.

Of course, almost all settlements will have a baker and the more remote, the more likely it is to be quite good. Put simply, bread is one of the easiest of all foodstuffs to get hold of. However, there is a wealth of information on the web about how to make bread in your pressure cooker, thus saving you the need to burn lots of gas by using the oven.

The argument that we will trot out is that bread does not keep very well and the smell of fresh baked bread while on passage will be lovely. However, the old rule that seventy percent of your time is spent in harbour is probably conservative and most cruisers most likely spend eighty or ninety percent in harbour. The longest passage on an Atlantic circuit is likely to be three weeks at most. That in a one year cruise!

Still, we have spent ages trying to get the bits together to allow us to make bread. We have the key item which is a pressure cooker. However, you still need a trivet of some type and a suitable container for the bread. It is amazingly difficult to get these things – even finding a pressure cooker can be difficult but thanks to Moreleys in Brixton we have had one for a long time. In the UK, my favourite cook shop is John Lewis on Oxford Street but they let me down and can only now sell bread makers!

Various ferreterias in Spain also failed to turn up the goods. Finally though a Chinese shop in Porto Santo, Madeira had a butterfly leaf steamer and a suitably sized tin.

We took our new possessions back to the boat and I had a go. There are not really any suitable recipes out there but I just poured what looked like enough flour into the bowl, added salt, yeast and some olive oil before adding water enough to make up a dough. I didn't bother kneading it but left it to rise for a while before putting on the pressure cooker. A web site we had found suggested 20 minutes. I added plenty of water to the bottom and turned things on. After twenty minutes we turned off and waited for the pressure to ease.

The result? Well it was bread alright but without a crust of course. Actually, it was really quite nice and we are looking forward to doing it again.