Hoosh

Hoosh is the soup that explorers ate to reach Antarctica. Hoosh is a soup made from a mixture of Pemmican, sledging biscuits and water but Antarctica usually uses melted snow instead. The characteristics of the hoosh are like soup but have no aroma.

Ingredients

• Pemmican - 60g (2 oz) per person
• Sled biscuits - 75g (2.5 ounces) per person
• Water - 100ml per person to start - ideally like snow from Antarctica, but the faucet will work if this is not available
• These numbers are all estimates.

Cooking Steps :

1. Melt the snow :You may not need to do this. I use crushed ice from the freezer for a level of authenticity. The key when using snow for water isn't filling a pan with snow and putting it on the fire, this will work, but it will take some time. A more efficient way is to melt a little snow/ice at the bottom of the pan so you have a layer of water and then add more ice so it melts little by little in the water.
2. Add pemmican :Mash the pemmican by hand or cut into pieces, add to the water and stir. This is now hoosh, a kind of stock (broth) made with pemmican as the mother of all cube broth.
3. Add sledging biscuits :Break the sledging biscuits and crumble into a skillet, mix and heat. The biscuits make them so thick you may want to add more water at this point to get the constituents you like. I thinned it down to the thick soup/liquid porridge texture that I love. There's no need for actual cooking because the ingredients are already cooked through, it's just a matter of making sure the ingredients are completely crumbled, getting the thickness right and making sure they're heated through.

Indictment

1. I didn't anticipate anything particularly impressive from this. In the field in Antarctica, instead of eating hoosh made from pemmican we eat freeze dried meat which is used in a similar way to pemmican which is accompanied by rice, pasta or dry potatoes and it is not tasty so I assumed that hoosh with pemmican would be worse.
2. I know it's not visible on the spoon in that last picture, but it's actually pretty good. I thought there might be a slight fat-slick from the pemmican but it's not noticeable at all, maybe spreading itself through the hoosh. I can't get all the meat in my pemmican to a fine powder and so there are tiny bits of jerky all over (in a kind of crunchy v smooth peanut butter) which I really like, it gives me something to chew on and extra texture.
3. It's so filling, it's not a snack! Even though I eat it in my warm kitchen wearing a t-shirt, I can imagine it's just the stuff to warm and fuel you in the freezing cold at the end of a cold, hard day or during your lunch break.