[pct-l] Dehydrating Food

[bellmore1975 at yahoo.com (Jon Bellmore)]

Thanks for the advice.  I don't have any plans at this moment to package food for the entire trip.  I was thinking about half of the food (or is this almost too much ?).  The rest would be store bought before I leave and along the way in towns to get a taste of something different.  I think I'll find the books, get over to walmart and start experimenting.  Thanks for all the advise.  

cmkudija@earthlink.net wrote:It's been a looong time since I spent lots of time dehydrating food - but I
can attest to the superior quality of stuff you've prepared yourself. We
never had the thru-hiker hunger at town stops, and never ate ramen (totally
useless non-nutritious non-food item, except for the salt content). Then
again, we spent twice as long cooking our dinners.

I've got a couple of suggestions in addition to the excellent books already
mentioned -

1. Don't try to dehydrate your entire trip's worth of food. You may find
you get sick of something and want variety - even if it's ramen. Then
you'll have wasted LOTS of time spent dehydrating and packaging when you
could have been conditioning your body instead (a mistake I made).
2. Go easy on the fruit leather (it tends to wreak revenge on you).
3. Frozen veggies, including peas, beans & corn, dehydrate and reconstitute
well.
4. Compare the time/energy expense of making your own bean soups &
dehydrating them with the cost of bulk dehydrated soup flakes. The latter
might be a better bargain in the long run. You really do need the time to
condition your body & feet.
5. Use "Pantry Pest Traps" by Safer (available at Home Depot, some
nurseries, probably OSH, other places) where you store your dehydrated food,
if it's not in the freezer, and in the room where you store your resupply
packages (if you store them for a friend to ship them on). These will
capture the wandering granary moth and save you having to deal with an
infestation on returning home. We had several boxes left over because of
truncating our trip - and a nasty mess in our storeroom (eewww...mealworms).
6. If you buy bulk rolled oats for breakfast cereal - either toast or freeze
them to kill pantry moth eggs. Trust me on this one. I didn't. Whoops.

Christine "Ceanothus" Kudija
PCT partially '94

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-----Original Message-----
From: pct-l-bounces@mailman.backcountry.net
[mailto:pct-l-bounces@mailman.backcountry.net]On Behalf Of Jeff Moorehead
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 4:37 PM
To: csx@schizoaffective.org
Cc: pct-l@mailman.backcountry.net
Subject: Re: [pct-l] Dehydrating Food

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....

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