Whatever the season, survivalists recommend this phloem
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Do you know what’s underneath the bark of a pine tree? Your great-grandparents did. That pale layer is called the phloem, or inner bark. About two millimetres thick, sitting between the hard outer bark and the wood, and it’s the only part of the tree worth eating. Fresh off the trunk it’s faintly sweet, close to fresh coconut in texture.
Do you know what’s underneath the bark of a pine tree? Your great-grandparents did. That pale layer is called the phloem, or inner bark. About two millimetres thick, sitting between the hard outer bark and the wood, and it’s the only part of the tree worth eating. Fresh off the trunk it’s faintly sweet, close to fresh coconut in texture.
In Sweden this bread was barkbröd. Families ate it through the famine of the 1690s, again in the 1860s, and it was still on tables as late as 1918.
The Sámi of the northern interior ate pine inner bark all winter and stayed clear of the scurvy that was killing farming families down on the coast.
Walk an old Scandinavian pine forest today and you can still find the scars. Trees peeled two and three hundred years ago healed around the cut and carried the mark the rest of their lives. …
THE BREAD Traditional method, modern equivalent in brackets.
– Harvest in June, when the sap is running and the bark lifts off in clean sheets
– Dry, roast and pound the inner bark as shown, then sift out the coarse fibre Work the bark flour into your rye at that same 1 to 3 ratio, then bake it like any rye loaf
– Leaven with a rye sourdough starter, the way northern kitchens always did (yeast works, it just tastes flatter)
– Add water and salt, knead, prove long and slow. Bark flour has no gluten, so the dough stays heavy and the rise is modest.
– That’s correct, not a failure Shape flat rounds about an inch thick. Bake around 400°F for 40 to 50 minutes, until it sounds hollow underneath (a wood oven’s falling heat after the fire dies back)
– Traditional loaves had a hole through the middle and hung on a pole under the roof to dry hard. Kept a year that way
– Safety and harvesting notes are in the comments. Read them before you cut anything. Pine bark flour is one of hundreds of foods people knew how to make and then forgot.
Over a hundred more are in The Lost SuperFoods…
