Experimenting with a Hardtack Recipe
A few months ago I had a trial run of making hardtack in my air fryer – this because I'm at university and don't have access to an oven most of the time. Back then the hard tack rose a bit, making it brittle with a soft centre rather than hard all the way through like I intended.
I suspect the issues came in at two places: First, I left the dough in the fridge overnight, which could've given some yeast time to develop. Secondly, my biscuits were relatively thick, which I think could also have prevented them from properly baking all the way through.
Giving them some time to sit also produced some change – right out of the oven they were soft and breadlike, whereas after sitting in the fridge for a day or two it quickly did harden, though only the outer shell. The soft insides also meant that as soon as you broke through the outer shell it was quite brittle at the edges while being slightly chewy in the centre.
This time when I made my hardtack I've measured all the ingredients on my kitchen scale and I noted down the process so that I have a base to build on and refine going forward. I also tried baking it a lot sooner after making the dough and pressing the biscuits a lot thinner to hopefully avoid the rising problem.
Once I've got a proper hardtack recipe, I can then try adding spices or sugar, maybe some butter and milk, to get some different flavours and maybe some hard cookies. Hopefully I'll have something I can use to get a bit more creative with in the kitchen, rather than just following a recipe like I'm used to.
Method
Ingredients
- 137g of white bread flower (a bit more than 1 metric cup)
- 65g of water
- 5 bags of salt from the cafeteria – my scale claims that this is less than 1g
Note that I don't have any measuring implements, so I measured everything with a food scale. According to a random website, 132g of flour should be about 250ml (a cup), and 65g of water should be 65ml (four tablespoons and a teaspoon, if you want to measure it that way for some reason).
The salt can probably be approximated as "a pinch", though "a pinch" can be very little to a lot of salt, so... Just do what seems reasonable I guess, it really isn't that important as long as you don't oversalt it.
Preparation
- Mix a cup of flour (132g) with 60ml of water (about a quarter cup), and kneed it in as much as you can to form a thick dough. It probably took like ten or fifteen minutes for me.
- Wet the last dregs of flour with a little bit of water (I did about 5ml, probably should've gone with 1ml) and work it in to the dough; if the dough is now too wet add a little bit of flour back in (I used about 5g of extra flour).
- You should now have a dense ball of dough, about the consistency of Play-Doh, maybe a bit harder. (Note that my memories of playing with it is quite vague, so perhaps not...)
- Preheat the air fryer to 180°C (356F) for five minutes.
- Form the dough into flat disks, quite thin (I had less than 1 cm I believe). Poke some holes into the disks so that it can breathe while baking (I used a pen).
- Bake for 20 minutes at 180°C.
- Flip them over, and bake for another 20 minutes.
- They should now be ready! Set them aside or in the fridge to cool.
Some photos
Results
So after a night in the fridge I ate one of them, and I must say that it tasted beautiful, though it was perhaps a bit over-salted.
However, there seems to have been some rising as while the outer shell is relatively hard the inside is soft, maybe even a bit fluffy, despite the hardtack appearing as if it hasn't risen. This certainly isn't objectionable, however it is not what I'm looking for.
I'll do some research on how this can be prevented. In the meantime I'll leave the other two biscuits in the fridge for a day or two and see if they harden some more with time.