BEST BACKPACKING FOOD AND FOOD DEHYDRATING

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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kbarb
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Re: BEST BACKPACKING FOOD AND FOOD DEHYDRATING

Post by kbarb »

Little late to the party here - the thread was started in 2011 !
But in case anyone finds it . . .

I bought a very inexpensive food dehydrator - a 500watt Nesco FD-60 Snackmaster - years ago and dehydrate all my backpacking meals. It's gone up in price to around $50-60 but it works quite well. I added a manual switch inline, and also, plug it into a simple lighting/appliance timer so it will shut itself off when running into the night.

At first I was checking out "camping food" recipe books from the library until I realized, you can pretty much dehydrate almost any meal you like, nothing really special about it.

One tip is, make sure the pieces are small so they both dehydrate and rehydrate quickly..
Once for a special occasion I made lasagna - which turned out to be good - but a total hassle because it's difficult to maintain the structure.
It's much easier to make something like that and just chop it all up ahead of time, like your teeth would do anyway. That is, make spaghetti sauce instead.

In general it's a lot easier to make pasta and rice type dishes, of any national origin (curries, etc.) - and just dehydrate the sauce part of it - the rice and pasta are already dried.
And if you're doing gloppy things like sauces you'll be better off with more of the solid plastic trays that the dehydrators don't usually come with.

Last, when I get into it I make several meals one after the other. If I don't use them, I just store them in ziplocks in the freezer for the next time.

Good luck !
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