How to Dehydrate and Package Food for Backpacking

Using dehydrated food for backpacking is a great idea. It allows you to plan full, varied and healthy meals at a minimal weight. It is a fun and engaging process to cook and dehydrate food and it is great to have a homemade, hot meal with minimal effort after a long day on the trail.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Food Dehydrator

1. Buy or borrow a food dehydrator. You will want an electric dehydrator with a heat source and a fan or a convection dehydrator. There are many models available. If you are purchasing your own you will want to explain your purposes at the store and get a suggestion from the sales staff.

2. Plan all of your meals for your trip. Stews, hearty soups, casserole type dishes and spaghetti with homemade sauce are all good choices. You will want to use recipes that allow you to prep ingredients by chopping them up into small pieces. Small pieces are easier to dehydrate than large chunks.

3. Cook your planned meal completely. Chop up the meal components into small pieces.

4. Set your dehydrator to its highest setting and let it warm up.

5. Place the small pieces of food on a dehydrator tray. Put the tray into the dehydrator. Plan to let it sit for at least 4 to 6 hours. Be available to check on the food from time to time as it is dehydrating.

6. To check on food: Wash hands and open dehydrator carefully. Feel several pieces of food. If pieces seem too moist use your hands to gently crumble them into smaller pieces. The food is done dehydrating when it is crunchy and crumbly to the touch.

7. Put your dehydrated meal in a plastic bag. Use a vacuum seal system if you have one available. Label the bag with the name of the meal. the day it was made, the day you are planning to eat it and how many people it will feed.

8. Storage depends on what kind of backpacking you will be doing. For most dehydrated food storage in a cooler is ideal, but food will last tightly packaged and wrapped in dark plastic in a cool, dark part of your backpack.

Tips & Warnings

• Test the rehydration properties of a few meals before you rely on this as a backcountry food system.

[hunting-fanatic]

on 4/9/2008 thanks i will try that

[carolineschley]

on 4/8/2008 I would reccomend bringing minute rice and cooking on the trail OR those bags of rice that you just have to heat up(uncle bens-i think it´s called ready rice? The stuff they advertise as 90 seconds in the microwave) are really, really great but a little heavier.

[hunting-fanatic]

on 4/7/2008 when making rice should i just cook the rice on the trail or should i cook it at home dehydrate it and then hydrate again on the trail, which would be quicker