[jenjen]

Other thoughts for food on an extended trip: - Spaghetti sauce dries just like a fruit leather. It keeps almost indefinitely and rehydrates easily for meals. - Chicken sausage also dehydrates really well. Take it out of the casings, sautee it till it's done, rinse under hot water to get as much grease off as you can, spread paper towels on the dehydrator trays to absorb the rest of the grease, and dry it till it's the consistency of kitty litter. It doesn't look like much, but it's darned tasty. You can do the same thing with ground beef. I've tried using pork sausage, but I just can't get enough of the fat out of the pork and it goes rancid. - Ramen noodles make a good stand in for pasta to use with the above sauce and sausage. And the oil the noodles are fried in adds needed calories to your meal without adding anything. Home dehydrated meals take a bit more planning than freeze dried meals do. At home I package the sauce, chicken sausage (or ground beef), and whatever dehydrated veggies all together in a ziplock. On the trail, at lunch time I add some water to the baggie and pop it into a Pringles container (or lays - one of those round sturdy containers) so it can rehydrate for a couple of hours. In camp I bring my water to boil, add the now rehydrated sauce and goodies, add a package of ramen noodles (ditch the seasoning packet), and let it all boil for a couple of minutes. There you have it, backcountry homemade spaghetti. Instant black beans are tasty, healthy, and filling. They rehydrate cold just fine - spread them on tortillas with some cheese and a packet of taco sauce. In the heavy but worth it category is the tuna in pouches. Every flavor I've tried has been really good. Hard cheese travels well. Stick a chunk of parmesan in your pack and enjoy.

[GoBlueHiker]

[sarbar]

[GoBlueHiker]

[sarbar]

Jenjen, what I have found is that using a cozy with home dried meals simplifies it. All I do is add boiling water to my meals at dinner time, put in my cozy for a good 10-15 minutes and then it is ready. No cooking, no pans Better than ramen is Chuka Soba noodles-better tasting and they cook like ramen (which means they will "cook" just by having boiling water put on them and letting sit for a couple minutes in a cozy.

[sarbar]

[Starjumper7]

[GoBlueHiker]

[GoBlueHiker]

[Starjumper7]

[Starjumper7]

[sarbar]

Most of Just Tomatoes line is freezedried rather than dried. Somewhere I have a list the nice customer service lady sent me, of what is dried and what is FD The salmon in pouches is usually wild salmon..but, is processed in Thailand many times. So be careful. Seawallrunner asked me a bit ago what I was using for a cozy-since not everybody knows what a cozy is. I use this one currently: http://www.antigravitygear.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=3_13&products_id=72 AGG also makes cozies for about every pan or pot out there-and he does custom jobs also. Worth looking at if you haven't used a cozy before-cozies save a lot of fuel!

[Starjumper7]

I just did a google search on dehydrating blueberries and it said they could dehydrate whole ones in eleven hours but when I did it it took many days and still didn't work that well. They are evidently using way too much heat, which is not good because anything over 105 degrees starts destroying important enzymes. Keep it below 105 (for any fruit) and they really are 100% as good as fresh. They suggested cutting the blueberries in half to lessen the drying time so that is probably the only solution for low temp. dehyration; cutting in half, slicing, or slightly crushing somehow in order to break them open.......... Except for freeze drying, but that probably takes some special equipment?

[Allison]

For best results in dehydrating, I strongly recommend rinsing (whether chicken sausage or GB) to eliminate as much fat as possible. Stuff just doesn't dry right or rehydrate right unless you do this. If you want to add fat back in (I do) then just bring olive oil, or whatever fat you like, conditions permitting, to your meal. I prefer olive oil in the summer as it does not go off as easily as some of the other tasty fats. I'm never out for more than 5 days though, so YMMV. I'm betting bacon grease would hold up well too, it holds in the freezer for 2-3 years, so it might tolerate the vagaries of warm weather and poor handling.

[jenjen]

I've read about the cozies, but I haven't made and used one yet. I have an old z-rest laying around, I'm gonna have to give that a try. GoBlue, the pork sausage I did went rancid on day 3. I had thought it would be great for flavor and needed calories, but it just didn't work out. If I get rid of as much fat as humanly possible, the meat lasts at room temperature and in a pack for over a year. I'm actually having the same sticking point with making my own jerky - I want to leave some of the fat on for flavor, but then it just doesn't last. On berries - thickly sliced strawberries work well, but I haven't had any luck with other berries. They're ok if you re-hydrate them in water as a sauce, but really they taste better if you make the sauce and then dehydrate that. (I hope that made sense) The "Just Blueberries" are freeze dried if I recall correctly - I haven't figured out how to do that at home. I guess I've known about the mercury content in tuna but hadn't thought it out to the pouched tuna. Dang! I'll have to try the salmon. I know I've seen chicken done in the same sort of pouches, but it didn't look cooked quite through so I added it to the cook pot for a couple of minutes. Ground beef is so easy to dry it wouldn't make sense to carry it pouched. Does ham come in pouches yet? That could make for a good meal. Other stuff you can find dehydrated is hash browns. They carry dehydrated hash browns at Costco here in B'ham. Very handy to add to soup mix and dehydrated beef for a sort of stew. Or for anywhere else you'd use potatoes. The Idahoan instant potatoes are really good. Dayhike Mike introduced me to the different mixes - really tasty, filling stuff. I already mentioned tucking a few fresh veggies into your pack for treats. Dehydrated and freeze dried stuff will only get you so far before you really, really want to crunch into something fresh and real. Oh! Couscous rehydrates well in cold water and makes a good starchy meal when mixed with some dried veggie soup mix. Get very creative with dried veggie soup mix - Knorr makes a good one but there are lots of different brands. I doctor up the soup mix and use it as a base for stews, couscous, instant rice dishes, to mix into instant potatoes........ It's actually pretty versatile.