do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Have a favorite trail recipe or technique you'd like to share? Please do! We also like reviews of various trail food products out there. The Backcountry Food Topix forum is the place to discuss all things related to food and nourishment while in the Sierra wilderness (as well as favorite trail head eateries).
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ERIC
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by ERIC »

Haha yes! The July trip! And the salad on the July trip! :)
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by robow8 »

Here's a photo of the rehydrated salad at camp. It was delicious! We're going to have it twice on the Rae Lakes loop next month.
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by ERIC »

Looks good! Will have to try. Thanks for posting the picture.
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by gary c. »

It does look good.
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by justm »

I have a great recipe, Green Chili bean soup !!!
I dehydrate Hatch Green Chili Enchilada sauce,and Safeway whole canned green chilis at home.
I buy, Mexicali Rose Dehydrated homestyle refried beans on Amazon.
At camp, add the above in the amounts you like to a pot along with 2 packets of concentrated chicken broth ( you can get them at Trader Joe's) and the appropriate amount of water, depending on how thick you want it. .
Add some Monterey Jack cheese at the end, maybe some crunched up tortilla chips ......enjoy :)
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by wanderin.jack »

All our backpacking meals is daydreamed at home using a the Excalibur dehydrator. We've used cheaper ones and found that you get what you pay for. Love Excalibur and we use it for a lot more than backpacking food. Right now we have pumpkin seeds in it that we soaked over night in brine.


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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by fishmonger »

That Green Chili Bean Soup recipe sounds tasty. Have to try it.

Haven't reported back from our hike, but all the food we dehydrated ourselves performed to full satisfaction. The shredded pork burrito was excellent, and once we optimized our preparation in the jetboil, it also didn't stick to the pot while not being too runny. It really worked best to prepare the dehydrated burrito filling with slightly too much water, so that even after soaking for 15 minutes, it was still runny enough for a brief re-heat without sticking to the bottom of the pot. Then we just thickened it with dehydrated refried beans we also brought along. Those only take second to rehydrate, giving us a thick and hot fill for the tortillas.

Another success was a pretty simple spaghetti meal For that, I had dehydrated our favorite Newman's Own Spaghetti sauce into what they call "leather" - and that is exactly what that resulting red material feels like. Additionally we packed some of that "gravel" dehydrated ground meat I made, as well as some dry onion, red peppers and obviously some angel hair pasta. The meat and veggies got rehydrated half an hour earlier in a zip lock so that the final preparation was real fast. Heated the water for the sauce, added the leather I had chopped into small pieces, the already hydrated meat and veggies, heated that to a boil. Put in our sumo plastic bowl, then quickly heated the spaghetti, drained and added the sauce into the big pot. Done. Some parmesan would have been great. Will bring that next time.

My Cajun bean soup was great - in spite of large slices of dried sausage, that meal rehydrated fine in 15 minutes. The only problem I have with it are the sharp bean pieces that want to puncture any bag you put the dry soup into. I double packed it and it still leaked some out into the bear can.

Also good was the potato soup we created from a can of Creamy Potato Soup Mix (Providence Pantry - bought that 2 years ago) plus meat and veggies I dried on the Excalibur. We thickened that soup mix by straining the potato pieces out of some of the mix to add to the part we took along, increasing the potato to soup ratio. Also added bacon bits.

The homemade Beef Stroganoff wasn't so good, but mostly because we didn't get the sauce seasoned right. The bar with that meal was high, though, as we love the Mountain House Stroganoff. I think in the future, I'll just return to that and focus on dehydrating burritos and soups. If things go as planned, I plan to be back up in the high country solo in about 4 weeks for a late fall hike down the JMT after all the crowds have left. The only thing that'll change about the food is the size of the Jetboil pot and the portion sizes, being solo.
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by fishmonger »

Enjoying the pulled pork recipe from Gary C on page 4, slightly modified, but mostly the same . Near Hutchison Meadown on Piute Pass

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Homemade pulled pork burritos for supper

ImageNow that's a hiking meal
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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by longri »

Since we're on the subject, here's my green chile meal.
I make this to eat at home sometimes. It's the same for the backcountry, it's just dehydrated.

- 2 16oz cans of black beans
- 8-10 fresh pasilla (aka poblano) peppers
- 2 jalapeño (optional)
- 1 yellow onion
- 5-6 cloves of garlic
- cilantro
- olive oil
- salt
- 2c Thai Jasmine rice

That's enough for about 6 servings.

Empty the black beans into a colander and rinse. Then dehydrate.

Roast the peppers over a flame until black. I spear them with a fork and turn them over our kitchen gas stove with the flame spreader removed. Then wash the burnt skins off and remove the stems, seeds and membranes. Chop them into smallish pieces, as you like. (I use pasilla peppers because that's what we've got here. If you live in New Mexico you obviously have other, probably better, choices. The pasillas are quite nice though; very flavorful and a bit spicy without being really hot.)

Finely chop the onion and mince the garlic. Saute with the oil and salt. Add a handful of chopped cilantro. When the onions are softened add the chiles and simmer for around 20 minutes or so. You'll know when they're done.

Let the mix cool then spoon onto dehydrator sheets. Because of the oil the final dried product will be greasy, but the peppers and onions should be otherwise dehydrated. I find it best to keep it in the freezer until it's time to go on a trip. Then it keeps surprisingly well. I've taken this mixture overseas and eaten it a few weeks after removal from the freezer, just in a tightly wrapped ziplock.

Cook the rice as usual, cool and then dehydrate. Optionally cook raw rice in the wilderness instead. Or use some nasty supermarket instant rice.

In the backcountry, add hot water to the beans and chile mixture separately (if you have enough containers) while the rice is rehydrating (or cooking) in the pot. The chile and beans both rehydrate very, very easily. They don't seem to lose much in the dehydrating process.

Serve the chile and beans on top of the rice.

Eat.

Then have some chocolate and tea.


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Re: do you dehydrate your own trail meals?

Post by gary c. »

Sounds really good, I'll have to give it a try.
"On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude."
-- Lionel Terray
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