Headline        LET US BREAK PILOT BREAD       

Subhead         FROM SOUPS TO SKEET SHOOTING, CRACKER THE STUFF OF ALASKA LORE

Run Date        4/13/1997      

Day     Sunday 

Page    A1     

Section         Nation  Edition        

Photo By Erik Hill Daily News Photo    

Story Byline    By Sandi Mcdaniel Daily News Reporter  

Pilot bread, slightly oval and lumpy as the moon. As mouthwatering as a laundered Saltine. As succulent as a wood chip. As appetizing as drywall. And yet, more versatile than Bubba Gump's shrimp (''Yew can BBQ it, boil it, broil it, bake it ...'') Say what you will, this unremarkable staple, this tortilla of the north, is as much a part of Alaska as bunny boots and honey buckets. So you can imagine the tremors here when Nabisco announced last May it would discontinue its pilot bread, a ''niche'' product for 205 years. ''We were almost panicked for a while,'' said Alice Panigeo, who works for the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corp. of Barrow. ''We thought maybe they wouldn't produce it no more.'' TX: But Alaskans don't eat Nabisco pilot bread -- a favorite in New England. We eat Sailor Boy pilot bread, made by Interbake Inc. Last year, we ate 2 million pounds of it, about 95 percent of all the pilot bread the company makes. Annual sales top $2.5 million. So rest easy. No one would dream of discontinuing the flavorless cracker Bush pilots have stocked for emergencies and ship captains have admired for its longevity. In fact, after New Englanders set their jaws, Nabisco resurrected its Crown Pilot Crackers last month. ''We thought we were discontinuing a cracker,'' said Nabisco's marketing director Mark Hosbein. ''It was apparent we were interrupting history. ...'' In Alaska, a fondness for Interbake's big, blue box goes beyond brand loyalty; it's an ad man's dream. ''It has a sailor boy on it,'' said Elizabeth Lewis-Weber, who grew up eating the crackers in Wrangell. ''A lot of people (Outside) don't even know what pilot bread is,'' she said. ''They just don't get pilot bread there. I don't understand.''  BIG SPONGE  For the record, Interbake's crackers are cranked out in a big, noisy factory in Tacoma, Wash. -- 20,000 pounds a shift, two shifts a week, 15 workers per shift, said Frank Prechiso, general manager. ''I eat it,'' said Prechiso. ''I don't eat a lot of it.'' The bread begins as a ''sponge,'' or starter, which is mixed into dough. Yeastless, it languishes four hours before a series of reduction rollers flatten it into an even sheet, 39 inches wide. Die cutters, eight across, stamp a precise 28 holes in each cracker. The holes compress the bread and ''prevent you from getting a bunch of pillows,'' said Tom Sparks, plant manager. The scrap is pulled away and the crackers keep moving through a flamed oven, baking five minutes. Lumps are caused by escaping steam. After cooling, the crackers are stacked and ushered into packages, about 38 to a box. With no eggs or oil to make them go rancid and little water to make them mold, they have an unbelievable shelf life. Trucked to barges, barged to trucks, tossed aboard planes -- once this Alaska side dish hits the Bush, it's parceled out in unimaginable ways. Even the people who make it wonder what Alaskans do with all that pilot bread. ''I'm quite curious about how people use the product,'' said Eric Esch, West Coast business manager for Interbake in Seattle.  FEELING QUEASY?  OK, heck, let's be honest. Who's above a little cold Spam and pilot bread for breakfast once in a while? Alaskans eat pilot bread with salmon -- dried, spread or pickled. With cheese -- shredded, melted or creamed. With garlic butter. With salmonberry jam. We eat it toasted and sprinkled with salt like a pretzel. Fried in bacon grease and set out to cool. Slathered in butter, cream cheese, Crisco or mayonnaise. With cake sprinkles. Dipped in seal oil. Crumbled into soup. Popped in the microwave with pizza toppings. Littered with sardines. Smothered in fermented cabbage. When she was 5, Polly-Beth Odom of Palmer, spread peanut butter over pilot bread and called it PB cubed. Out of loaf bread? Reach for the pilot bread. ''Eating a pilot bread sandwich is a very, very unique skill,'' said Elise Patkotak of Barrow, who writes a column about life in America's northernmost community. ''It's critical that you smash it down right, otherwise it just squeezes out when you're biting it.'' The only thing better than peanut butter and jelly on pilot bread, said Patkotak, is avocado and mayonnaise. Or possibly peanut butter and honey, peanut butter and raisins or peanut butter and mayonnaise. ''The mayonnaise stops the peanut butter from sticking to the top of your mouth,'' said Anita Cruise, program director for KSKO radio in McGrath. State worker Linda Culbertson got a taste for the crackers as a girl when prowling through her dad's Vietnam C-rations, which held a tin of stale crackers. As a new mother, she used pilot bread to get her daughter through teething. Now, nearly every day at 10 a.m. Culbertson and a co-worker take a pilot bread break. ''It's sort of become a daily ritual for us to ... pull out the pilot bread and slap on the cheese and salsa,'' Culbertson said. ''You can or not put butter on it. Butter makes things slide down easier.'' Fishermen still are fond of pilot bread. There's no better snack when hauling in red salmon, said Catie Bursch, who fishes out of Homer, than a whopping helping of salmon salad on pilot bread. ''We had one crew member who had a real nervous stomach,'' she said, ''and he went through eight boxes of them. ... If you're feeling a little queasy, you might want to eat a pilot bread.''  IT ABSORBS  By far, the bulk of pilot bread in Alaska is eaten by Natives. And we do mean bulk. ''Oh, golly days, I was raised with the stuff,'' said Donald Nielsen, an Aleut who grew up in Bristol Bay. ''Pilot bread to us is like water to a dying man in the desert. ... Where I come from, it's a community food. You would never find a household without it.'' In summer, Alice Panigeo packs pilot bread before flying to traditional Inupiat hunting grounds south of Barrow. For weeks, she and her family live on what they've brought and what they can catch. A typical camp meal is caribou stew or dried white fish followed by a piece of pilot bread, nibbled with tea. The practice of having tea and pilot bread after eating oily traditional foods is common among Natives, said Tom Okpealuk. The tea cuts the taste. The bread ''absorbs a lot of stuff,'' he said. Doesn't everyone eat their pilot bread with boiled caribou bone marrow? ''You can take the marrow out and spread it on a pilot bread cracker and sprinkle salt on it and eat it,'' said Sharon Brown Korwan, an Inupiat who works for the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. in Anchorage. Don't knock it until you try it. ''Even my mom, she has no teeth, but she still eats it,'' said Martha Giancoli, an Anchorage homemaker originally from Sleetmute. ''She soaks it in her coffee every morning.'' Dolly Vartanian, who grew up in Teller, is convinced pilot crackers spread with butter and garlic help control her high blood pressure. ''I couldn't live without it,'' she said, ''and I think that's how most villagers feel.''  THE STUFF OF LIFE  But people aren't just eating the sturdy crackers. The truly resourceful have used them for skeet shooting, according to Interbake, which keeps a file on this sort of thing. When the cracker first arrived in Unalakleet, people tried them out on the beach as Frisbees, according to Asta Keller, a frequent participant in the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, who heard the story from a friend of a friend. One wholesaler has packaged the crackers with dehydrated soup and sold it to the Japanese government for earthquake survival kits. It wouldn't be the first time a pilot cracker saved someone's life. Eberhard Brunner, a guide and photographer, claims to have survived five days on pilot bread and chocolate Jell-O pudding after crashing his Super Cub on the Stony River in 1978. Brunner always kept a box of Sailor Boys, a roll of duct tape and Gatorade in his plane. He had other emergency edibles, but most remembers the taste of pilot bread pudding, six layers deep in a bowl, as he waited by a campfire to be rescued. ''It was the most delicious pudding I ever had,'' he said. Tom Reale, a free-lance writer, threw some Sailor Boys into his gear before heading off for a sheep hunt in the Wrangell Mountains four years ago. It turned out to be all he and three companions had to eat when their ride was a week late. That and a little salami and cheese, which they cooked into pilot bread pizzas. But let's be really creative. ''In 1976, we were on a hunting trip up the Dog Salmon River off of Bristol Bay,'' said Bill Jones, who is retired from the Air Force. ''My wife's birthday came up. Forty-seventh birthday. And we used pilot bread and peanut butter for her birthday cake.'' For Eric Wallace, the cracker was as soothing and addictive as a cigarette when editing a lengthy film project for KAKM-Channel 7 in 1990. ''It fulfilled nerves, it took care of hunger, it distracted me when I was going through these long, creative hours,'' he said. Unfortunately, at 100 calories per cracker, Wallace soon felt like a duck bloated with bread crumbs and was forced to wean himself off the crackers to reverse his weight gain. For Elizabeth Lewis-Weber, 69 and retired from the Alaska Native Medical Center, pilot bread is mingled with memories of life in the north country. Her family carried the crackers on camping trips on the Stickine River, always with a coterie of friends, brothers and uncles. Along chilly sloughs, hunting moose in fall or butter clams in summer, they munched pilot bread and ''squaw candy'' (dried salmon), washed down with Kool-Aid. ''We'd load up the scow and head up the river to pick berries and go up to the hot springs and up to the desert. Oh, it was beautiful. I miss the country down there,'' she said. ''Oh, I could tell you so many stories about that river.''  GOOD TO THE LAST BITE  While the actual shelf life of pilot bread is supposed to be about six months, Alaskans seem to keep it around much longer. A people accustomed to booms and busts may be hoarding the crackers, bracing for hard times. Without question, the blue boxes are stashed in cubbyholes and buried in caches all over the state. Scott Semans unearthed a box of Sailor Boys in his belongings not long ago. ''I was short of money and down to stuff I had stored, and I ate my 1974 pilot bread,'' said Semans. ''It tasted about the same.''