David White – Challenge of baking bread on board a submarine

So I always took fresh bread and I’d also freeze some bread because once the bread’s gone you’ve got to start baking it. 

Now there’s a little-known problem that only a Submariner knows about baking bread. You can spend hours kneading it and getting air into it, you then put it in the oven and the Captain starts snorting, so that’s sticking a mast up that sucks air down through the boat and that allows you to run those diesels at periscope depth.

Every time the mast dips below, especially if it’s a bit rough, you pull a vacuum in the boat and your bread goes [deflating noise] and you’ve spent ages and sweating cobs putting air into this dough to get it to rise with the yeast and then the Captain starts snorting and you shout out, “Oh that ****ing little berk, are you winding me up?!” 

‘Cos, if you haven’t got a good Planesman to keep the boat level and it dips and there’s a little, it’s like a snorkel, a little float shuts so you don’t suck water down into the engines. Before, in the time it takes him to stop the engines it sucks half the air out of the boat and your bread just goes zzzzzzz (laughs). 

So that’s very frustrating.