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Food dehydrating: The secret to packing light, small, & eating better in the bush.
The key to affordable, lightweight, and good satisfying meals for longer outings is to dehydrate your own meals. It's much easier than people imagine. The commercial freeze-dried meals are sometimes good but sometimes not, tend to be on the small side when it comes to serving sizes, are packed full of air, and they are expensive.
If you're planning on making camping a regular thing, a food dehydrator is a wise investment. You just cook your own foods (like what you'd eat at home) dehydrate it, and rehydrate it when you're at camp. It's easy, it's fast, it's clean, it won't spoil, and it's blessedly light and compact, so you can bring satisfying meals without having to buy a huge pack.
If you're hesitant about purchasing a dehydrator, it's worth considering that a week's worth of store-bought freeze-dried meals for two people will cost nearly as much as a dehydrator. You can buy dehydrators secondhand for a much less than the price of a new one. Many people buy them intending to make jerky and fruit leathers for their kids, lose interest, and then want to sell them. Look one Craigslist, E-Bay, and Kijiji and you'll find them cheaply.
The shelf life of dehydrated foods depends on moisture exposure. If you pack your dehydrated foods in Zip-lock bags or vacuum sealed bags, they will last months and up to years. We dehydrate nearly all our food for a year's worth of camping in the early spring, bag it all, and store it in the freezer (just in case the bags aren't sealed right) and then we put the dehydrator away until next year. I've occasionally discovered bags of dehydrated salsa, spaghetti sauce and chili in the back of the fridge that was well over a year old and it was perfectly good when re-hydrated. And remember, the refrigeration isn't necessary; it's just a precaution in case your bags aren't sealed completely.
A few tips in connection with dehydrated meals:
Whenever you are trying out a camping recipe for the first time, RE-hydrate and cook up your camp meals at home before you go into the bush. So, if you plan to rehydrate a spaghetti sauce and make spaghetti in the bush, you do it all at home first, using ONLY what you'd have with you in the bush: rehydrate it using whatever you'll have with you in the bush, cook it on your camp stove, prepare and eat it using what you'd use in the bush. This will ensure that you know what you will need to bring for that meal. You don't want to discover that cooking up your shepherd's pie takes far longer than you had expected or that you don't have a container to spare to re-hydrate your mashed potatoes while you boil water to rehydrate for the ground beef and corn . This will also give you a good sense of how much of a dehydrated ingredient you need to bring for each portion. It won't look like a lot once it's dehydrated and you're likely to bring and re-hydrate more than you need unless you re-hydrate and prepare it at home the first time.
Put all the ingredients for a given meal together into one container or Zip-lock bag, label it, and include a short post-it note describing how to prepare it in the bush as it may be months before you actually cook up that meal. You will be amazed how similar dehydrated chili and spaghetti sauce can look and you don't want to botch a much anticipated supper because you mixed up the ingredients from two meals or forgot that you needed to rehydrate something for 45 minutes and you need to eat right now. You may discover that you need to add an extra Nalgene container or something like that to your cook kit to serve as mixing bowl/rehydrating container.
Don't worry about dehydrating too much of this or that. Dehydrated foods, even meats, will last and last if you toss 'em in the freezer. We have often gone camping in the spring using just ingredients we'd dehydrated the fall before and had kept in the freezer. So don't sweat it if you dehydrated peas, corn kernels and ground beef to add to some Kraft Dinner or pasta and find that you have too many peas. Leave 'em in the freezer until your next trip.
There are plenty of sites and videos about food dehydrating out there, but my wife and I made two how-to videos on this subject specifically for campers and outdoorsy types that includes meal ideas, ingredient preparation, best practices, etc. Here are the links for those who might be interested in giving this a try.
1 - Dehydrating & Preparing a Camping Meal: http://youtu.be/hu1-9DkmUKI
2 - Dehydrating Foods for Backcountry Camping Meals: http://youtu.be/J3iYj025fcg
Hope this helps,
-Martin
The key to affordable, lightweight, and good satisfying meals for longer outings is to dehydrate your own meals. It's much easier than people imagine. The commercial freeze-dried meals are sometimes good but sometimes not, tend to be on the small side when it comes to serving sizes, are packed full of air, and they are expensive.
If you're planning on making camping a regular thing, a food dehydrator is a wise investment. You just cook your own foods (like what you'd eat at home) dehydrate it, and rehydrate it when you're at camp. It's easy, it's fast, it's clean, it won't spoil, and it's blessedly light and compact, so you can bring satisfying meals without having to buy a huge pack.
If you're hesitant about purchasing a dehydrator, it's worth considering that a week's worth of store-bought freeze-dried meals for two people will cost nearly as much as a dehydrator. You can buy dehydrators secondhand for a much less than the price of a new one. Many people buy them intending to make jerky and fruit leathers for their kids, lose interest, and then want to sell them. Look one Craigslist, E-Bay, and Kijiji and you'll find them cheaply.
The shelf life of dehydrated foods depends on moisture exposure. If you pack your dehydrated foods in Zip-lock bags or vacuum sealed bags, they will last months and up to years. We dehydrate nearly all our food for a year's worth of camping in the early spring, bag it all, and store it in the freezer (just in case the bags aren't sealed right) and then we put the dehydrator away until next year. I've occasionally discovered bags of dehydrated salsa, spaghetti sauce and chili in the back of the fridge that was well over a year old and it was perfectly good when re-hydrated. And remember, the refrigeration isn't necessary; it's just a precaution in case your bags aren't sealed completely.
A few tips in connection with dehydrated meals:
Whenever you are trying out a camping recipe for the first time, RE-hydrate and cook up your camp meals at home before you go into the bush. So, if you plan to rehydrate a spaghetti sauce and make spaghetti in the bush, you do it all at home first, using ONLY what you'd have with you in the bush: rehydrate it using whatever you'll have with you in the bush, cook it on your camp stove, prepare and eat it using what you'd use in the bush. This will ensure that you know what you will need to bring for that meal. You don't want to discover that cooking up your shepherd's pie takes far longer than you had expected or that you don't have a container to spare to re-hydrate your mashed potatoes while you boil water to rehydrate for the ground beef and corn . This will also give you a good sense of how much of a dehydrated ingredient you need to bring for each portion. It won't look like a lot once it's dehydrated and you're likely to bring and re-hydrate more than you need unless you re-hydrate and prepare it at home the first time.
Put all the ingredients for a given meal together into one container or Zip-lock bag, label it, and include a short post-it note describing how to prepare it in the bush as it may be months before you actually cook up that meal. You will be amazed how similar dehydrated chili and spaghetti sauce can look and you don't want to botch a much anticipated supper because you mixed up the ingredients from two meals or forgot that you needed to rehydrate something for 45 minutes and you need to eat right now. You may discover that you need to add an extra Nalgene container or something like that to your cook kit to serve as mixing bowl/rehydrating container.
Don't worry about dehydrating too much of this or that. Dehydrated foods, even meats, will last and last if you toss 'em in the freezer. We have often gone camping in the spring using just ingredients we'd dehydrated the fall before and had kept in the freezer. So don't sweat it if you dehydrated peas, corn kernels and ground beef to add to some Kraft Dinner or pasta and find that you have too many peas. Leave 'em in the freezer until your next trip.
There are plenty of sites and videos about food dehydrating out there, but my wife and I made two how-to videos on this subject specifically for campers and outdoorsy types that includes meal ideas, ingredient preparation, best practices, etc. Here are the links for those who might be interested in giving this a try.
1 - Dehydrating & Preparing a Camping Meal: http://youtu.be/hu1-9DkmUKI
2 - Dehydrating Foods for Backcountry Camping Meals: http://youtu.be/J3iYj025fcg
Hope this helps,
-Martin
