Hudson Bay Bread - What's in it?

by Dave Greenlee

Anybody can look at the ingredients in the recipe and see that bay bread is full of nutrients that help satisfy the kind of hunger you can only get while paddling and portaging all day long. Thanks to some detective work, now we can share a good bit more about the nutrition information.

Recently my daughter Meghan went to England and made a discovery. She had heard the story that Sandy Bridges told us about the origination of the recipe and its roots as an English snack called "flapjacks". Imagine her surprise when she saw some bay bread packaged in cellephane on the shelf of a convenience store. There were several kinds, but the one that looked most like bay bread was called "Mixed fruit flapjack".

She dutifully bought one and dragged it home so that I could see her discovery. On the front of the package, it says: "with raisins, sultanas, and currents". Since I didn't know what a sultana was, I checked the Internet and found out that in the U.K., a sultana is a dried Thompson Seedess grape, a "special" kind of raisin. Also, it certainly looks just like bay bread, except that the portion is about half the size of our typical 3 1/2" (just fits in a milk carton) size.

On the back is the ingredients list:

Oats (47%), Partially Inverted sugar syrup (containing flavouring), Margarine (containing emulsifiers), Colours (Annatto, Curcumin), Flavourings, Butter, Sugar, Raisins (2%), Sultanas (2%), Currants (2%)

...and even a table of nutrition information

* I doubled the values from the 75g portion to indicate a typical (150g) canoe base portion

Look at the carbohydrate! It sure isn't going to make it for the Atkins Diet. On the other hand, you can begin to see better why we look forward to it on the trail. Keep in mind that these numbers are BEFORE you put the peanut butter and jelly on.

Enjoy,

Dave