Sol 7: Martian food – What do we eat in a day?
Author : Pierre Fabre
Hi everyone! Today we are going to talk about Martian food! I know you readers are curious about what we eat on Mars, so we are going to teach you how to cook some delicious dishes with Martian ingredients! But first let’s talk about what happened during this Sol 7, beginning of our second week on Mars!
First, after two days of rest, we were back at the daily workout again this morning. I think the decision of our HSO took to rest during the weekend was a really good one. Everyone on the crew was in better shape this morning and nobody suffered from the intensity of the workout. When we will come back to Earth, the gravity will be around three times higher so we have to work hard not to lose our strength !
EVAs also made their come back this morning! I personally missed them this weekend as I didn’t participate in the EVA at Candor Chasma Saturday. Today, we went to the Hab Ridge, a ridge on the West side of the Hab. It offers a really cool point of view of the Hab and I was looking for the occasion to go there since the beginning of the mission. We took a path to the left just before reaching North Ridge arriving from the South and climbed our way to the Hab Ridge. The North Hab View was beautiful and we took some really cool drone videos and pictures. Then we climbed down and came home through another path which was easy to find from the top but nearly impossible to imagine from the bottom of the ridge. It was the perfect EVA to begin that new week and I can’t wait for the next ones.
Today was a good day for our astronomer Maxime. For technical reasons, he hasn’t been able to work on his research project of finding supernovae yet (we will definitely talk in more details about that awesome project during his interview which is coming soon), but he can now observe the Sun and monitor its activity each day. Today, he took a beautiful shot of the Sun with a nice flair at the top of the picture. It can be a sign of a potential danger for us in terms of radiations, but according to him there is, for this time, nothing to fear. I really hope that the technical problems will be solved before the mission ends and that we will be able to show you some nice deep sky shots. Stay tuned if you want to have a chance to see Maxime’s art pieces!
In yesterday’s report, I mentioned that we ate a pizza.
But, do you know how to cook pizza on Mars?
Today, just in case you go on Mars some day and you’re dying for a pizza, we are going to teach you how to cook a Martian pizza!
Ok first, what is the difference between food on Mars and food on Earth?
If you open a cabinet in a Martian kitchen, you will find tons of cans of different colours all aligned on each shelf. Those cans contain dried, or dehydrated, food. This means you have to rehydrate the food before it seems like something you would call food on Earth. We have beef, chicken, beans, corn, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes. Everything you would expect to see in a fridge on Earth. We also have some funny things like orange juice powder or butter powder (I’m not yet used to the smell of the butter powder to be honest, but when it is baked you can’t tell the difference).
So, cooking on Mars is kind of similar to cooking on Earth except every recipe starts with add x cups of water for y cups of dried ingredients.
For those, like me, who are not familiar with the imperial system, here is a reminder: 1 cup is 16 tablespoons or 48 teaspoons. Easy, isn’t it? For those who are more familiar with the metric system, 1 cup is equal to 236 mL.
At first you’re stuck with very basic recipes like rice with rehydrated vegetables and it is not very funny. But then you begin to be creative and you cook some delicious dishes just like the pizza I’ve been teasing you with. Now it is time to release the very famous and secret recipe of the Martian pizza by Crew 240.
First, we made the dough from scratch. This part of the recipe comes from Julie’s friend Lison and it is a very good recipe for dough! We started by adding 600g of flour to a bowl, together with 12g of sugar, 12g of salt, 30g of yeast, 32.5cl of water and 4 tablespoons of olive oil. Clement kneaded the dough for a little while before putting it away to rise for about an hour.
Meanwhile, Marion went to the Greenhab to harvest some basil for the pizza, the only real fresh ingredient of this pizza!
Once the dough had time to rise, we set the oven to preheat at 202ºC, we split the dough in two and rolled it out on round trays.
A cup of tomato powder was added to hot water to hydrate it and was then spread on the pizza dough. We then took a cup of dehydrated peppers, a cup of dehydrated onions and a cup of dehydrated beef and added two cups of hot water on top to hydrate all the ingredients. We added the toppings to the pizza.
Finally comes the cheese, it is hard to rehydrate it because it instantly melts with hot water. So we took two cups of dehydrated mozzarella cheese and added hot water to hydrate it, made some small balls and put them on the pizza.
We put both pizza in the oven and waited for about 15 minutes, took them out, added basil and enjoyed them! It was the perfect meal to end this first week of hard work on Mars. We are already waiting for the next pizza, maybe next Sunday!
That’s it for today’s report, I hope you enjoyed it! I also hope you will have the opportunity to taste this delicious Martian pizza one day! See you tomorrow for an interview of a new crew member!