[pct-l] Dehydrating Food

[jeffmoorehead1 at cox.net (Jeff Moorehead)]

I'm having tons o' fun dehydrating food. Right now I'm in the testing phase 
and I'm almost exclusively using the book entitled "Lipsmackin' Backpackin'" 
and also the newer vegetarian version. What a great book! Many of the 
recipes were delivered to the authors by none other than dyed-in-the-wool 
PCTers-- some right here on the list. Llamalady (Marion Davidson) has 
submitted some excellent recipes. I highly recommend this book.

I'm also vacuum packaging each dish and basically testing whether it is 
still good after several weeks at room temperature. Also, after packaging, I 
calculate the packaged weight per serving and then divide this into the 
number of calories per serving. This gives you a kind of 'caloric density' 
of the food that can be used to balance your diet along the trail. The best 
I've encountered so far is 270 calories per oz. (haven't switched to metric 
yet). The average is 175 cal/oz. This highlights another big advantage of 
dehydrating that people often don't consider-- and that is that it really 
lightens the load! It's amazing how light these foods get. Also, store 
bought dried food is not to be compared to home dehydrated. The latter 
reconstitutes faster and back to nearly the same consistency and texture.

Obviously I'm a big fan of this process. We'll see how chipper I am after 
dehydrating and preparing some 250 packages. Maybe I'll have a big 
'dehydration party', or possibly 'Tom Sawyer' some of the work out to 
someone who fancies themselves an expert in the food preparation process. 
Wish me luck....