[slickhorn]

I understand it's best to use a pressure cooker? Can anyone walk me through the procedure and seasoning technique please? I'd love to have a light dry chicken noodle soup for the trail. add some dumplings maybe. thanks!

[reststep]

Here is a previous thread about dehydrating chicken which may be of help. Link Edit: Check the 2nd page of the thread. Strider has some good info.

[slickhorn]

Thanks for that link. I'd read that thread before, but the only solution presented was to use ground chicken. Somewhere else I read that pressure cooked chicken and canned chicken will dehydrate, but regular home cooked will not. Can anyone confirm, or expand on that? Can one season the chicken before pressure cooking?

[sarbar]

Yes! This was something I talked about a couple years ago due to a lady, Beth, who went through the process. She found that pressure cooking chicken breasts and then shredding and or cutting it into small pieces and drying it, it rehydrated nicely. Canned chicken is essentially pressure cooked chicken as well. It dries up nicely and rehydrates great.

[kayakbear]

i pressure cooked some chicken breasts and am dehydrating them now, will let you know how its works out!

[marzsit]

30 minutes in the pressure cooker seems to be about right for costco frozen chicken breasts, i cook them without thawing and they fall apart into shreds easily by stirring with a fork. you can use any seasonings that you want, i like old bay and garlic packaged taco seasoning also works very well. they take about 12 hours in a nesco to fully dehydrate, and rehydrate fbc-style in about 20 minutes. not bad. the pressure cooking breaks down the fiberous texture of the chicken which allows it to rehydrate well. for non-backpacking, adding decent barbeque sauce to the freshly cooked shredded chicken makes an awesome bbq chicken sandwich... you can also make gravy using flour mixed with a little water and some seasoning and serve over mashed potatoes or toast.

[RayD]

Canned chicken dehydrates very well. Costs a bit more that way, though. In the dehydrated bird category, ground turkey is really good as a snack or an addition to your evening soup. Just plunk that in with some dried mushrooms, onion greens, instant brown rice, spices and oil of the olive and enjoy! I mix my ground turkey with some bread crumbs(Italian Style), chopped onion and garlic and roll out into a thin layer and dehydrate. It comes out like chips that are great as snacks as well as main meal additions. In the non-bird realm, dehydrated shrimp is also good. Now back to your regularly scheduled chicken thread.

[Allison]

So you just buy cooked shrimp like you'd use for a shrimp cocktail and dry that?

[sarbar]

Canned baby shrimp dry quite well - and the heavy salt adds to preservation.

[Allison]

Yeah but they taste like ass and are probably grown in former rice paddies in India. If I *can* dry something taster and more sustainable, I will.

[sarbar]

Read yer cans. Some are US grown and packed And India? More like Vietnam.

[Allison]

You're absolutely correct that we have inland fish farming here, so we can home-grow this garbage. You're also correct in your suggestion that it's not done in India, a quick Google search shows that it was made illegal there. It should be illegal everywhere, for a number of reasons. So what's the answer to my question about cooked shrimp?

[RayD]

I use raw shrimp that I boil and then dehydrate.

[JPH]

How about chicken breasts cooked in the crock pot instead fo a pressure cooker? Also, how about oven dehydrating instead of a regular dehydrator for chicken? I use the oven to dehydrate my lentils, beans and corn for backpacking since I don't have an actual dehydrator. If no one has tried this I might do the experiment and report back.

[Curt]

I dried some canned chicken this summer. It dried up incredibly well, but rehydrated poorly. Do you have to really boil it up for awhile to get it past the jerky texture?