(Natural News)—When disaster strikes, it pays to know how to make foods that do not need many ingredients, are very nutritious and can last a long time when properly stored. Here are five recipes for easy-to-make survival foods you should know by heart.
Hardtack
Also called hard bread, this tough biscuit is a survival food with a history going back as far as Ancient Rome.
Ingredients:
- 5 cups wheat flour
- 2 quarts water
- 3 teaspoons of salt
Combine all of these ingredients in a large mixing bowl. When the flour, salt and water have formed a dry bread dough, roll it out flat with a rolling pin or pat it out by hand. If the dough still has sticky spots, add more flour.
Make a 12-inch-thick dough sheet, cut it into three-inch squares and poke holes in both sides of each dough square. Bake these squares for 30 minutes per side at 375 F on an ungreased cookie sheet.
Keep your hardtack in a cool, dry and dark place away from pests. Once hardtack has fully dried, it can last for years if stored properly.
Pemmican
Pemmican is a very ancient forerunner to modern survival rations, known as a very weird meatball made of dried meat and rendered fat. It is filled to the brim with calories and its invention its popularity is traditionally credited to Native Americans.
Ingredients:
- 8 ounces of lard
- 8 ounces of packed powdered jerky chopped in a blender
- 8 ounces of dried fruit, ideally berries
Warm the lard in a pot to a temperature below 100 F until it turns into a soft, pasty texture. Keep stirring while it heats up. Stir your other ingredients into the softened fat until they have thoroughly combined with the lard, which usually takes about two minutes of continuous stirring.
If you have the ingredients, feel free to add small amounts of flour or other starch sources for additional carbohydrates. You can even add different spices to add some flavor.
Turn off the heat and, once the mixture is cool enough to touch, scoop it out by hand and compress it into round balls or flat cakes. Be sure to let the pemmican completely cook before you store it.
Traditionally, pemmican would usually be stored in rawhide containers. Instead of this, you can wrap up the pemmican in wax paper and keep it stored in a cool place. If kept relatively cool, pemmican can last for months. However, as the weather warms, it would be wise to eat the pemmican before the fat begins to smell rancid.
Bannock
Sometimes called skillet bread, bannock is a round, flat, unleavened bread that is associated with Scotland and northern England. Although you can adapt a bannock recipe for the oven, it is meant to be cooked in a skillet over a campfire or in a fireplace.
Ingredients:
- 4 cups all-purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 ¾ cups dried fruit (e.g., cherries)
- 1 teaspoon chopped rosemary
- 1 ½ cups buttermilk or sour milk
Preheat your oven to 300 F.
In a medium-sized bowl, combine all of your dry ingredients except for the dried fruit and rosemary. Thoroughly mix them. Chop your dried fruit and rosemary into very fine pieces and set aside.
Now that you have a bowl full of dry ingredients, make a well in the center for your buttermilk. Add the buttermilk to the well and begin to slowly incorporate flour from the sides – this will allow you to control the dough consistency. Do not collapse the sides of the well. You will have leftover flour to coat your table and to use while you knead the dough.
Once the batter becomes stodgy and pasty, you can add your finely chopped dried fruit and rosemary. At this point, you are going to dump the dough out onto a floured surface. Work the dough and add flour until it becomes less sticky and the dried fruit and rosemary are fully incorporated.
At this point, you are ready to begin baking the bannock. Bake the bannock for 20 minutes until it has started to brown a bit. Remove the bannock and allow it to rest and cool. After the bannock has completely cooled, it can be sliced and served or sliced and stored.
The best storage method is to keep it whole until you need it. If you leave it uncovered, it will get very hard in a couple of days. Freezing would be the best way to keep it for a really long time. But if you don’t have that option, keep it hard and dry. (Related: 8 survival bread recipes for preppers.)
Biltong
Biltong is a traditional South African food that consists of dried and marinated meat. Whereas jerky is often smoked, biltong is cured with vinegar, salt and spices and then air-dried. Also, you can make biltong from a large variety of meat cuts.
Ingredients:
- 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of lean meat
- 2 cups brown sugar
- 3 cups plump sea salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 tablespoons ground black peppercorns
- 100 ml Worcestershire sauce
- 5 cups vinegar
- 4 tablespoons of ground coriander seeds
To prepare the meat, always cut to the length of the grain, never against it. Prepare 1 cm thick slices of meat and then put those slices into the vinegar-Worcestershire sauce mix for half an hour. Store the remaining vinegar in the fridge because it will be used later in the recipe.
Crush all the spices and then mix in the salt, baking soda and sugar. Make sure that all the meat is perfectly coated with this and then layer those slices on a clean plate. Place the thickest slice at the base and the other chucks above it. Sprinkle your remaining spice mixture on top of the upper layer. Refrigerate for at least eight hours.
Take out the refrigerated chunks of meat and then soak them again in the vinegar mix for at least 15 minutes. Remove the meat slices and then rinse out the salt residue from every piece. Squeeze the moisture out of the meat pieces.
You can then dry the biltong in two different ways in the oven or in the traditional way by hanging the strips up on racks in a room with good circulation. Alternatively, the strips can be refrigerated and, if frozen, they can last for up to a year.
Trail biscuit
This is a stick-to-your-ribs food that will help stretch rations or fill bellies. The egg and lard are optional, but if you’re not using lard, substitute the baking powder for a couple of teaspoons of baking soda.
Ingredients:
- 3 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons baking powder
- 1 egg (optional, if available)
- 1 teaspoon salt
- ½ cup lard (or butter)
- 1 ½ cups milk
Preheat oven to 370 F or stoke your coals so they’re hot enough to cook on.
Combine flour, salt and baking powder (or baking soda) in a bowl, then cut the cold lard (or butter) into the flour mixture until you have pea-sized pieces. Add milk until the dough is barely sticky. Don’t overmix or your biscuits will be tough.
Drop about ¼ cup of the batter into a greased pan or Dutch oven. Cook for 20 minutes or so until the biscuits are brown. If using a Dutch oven, put the biscuits in.
There are many, many more survival foods you can make to keep you well-fed with necessary nutrients during survival situations, such as parched corn, trench cake, jerky, dried fruit, beans and rice and peasant’s bread. What’s important is you are aware of the kinds of foods you can make that can keep you sustained during emergencies.
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Watch the following video to learn how to make survival chocolate.
This video is from the Cahlen channel on Brighteon.com.
Sound off about this article on the Late Prepper Substack.
More related stories:
- Prepper recipes: How to make pinole, a tasty survival superfood.
- How to make matzoh, a survival food from biblical times.
- How to make hominy, an ancient survival food.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
