Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Your favorite dehydrated food

Putting my gear list together for a multiday backpack..and I'm at that point where I gotta figure out my food. Seems like I keep going back to my old stand-bys. Ho-hum...I need some ideas. What are your favorites for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Be specific and if you have a homemade fav...provide a recipe so we can all try it! Thanks and I'm looking forward to seeing what satisfies your hunger!

My current favorite is Packit Gourmet products, which sells a good variety for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their meals pack flat, and most can be cooked in the bag or in a pot. Their smoothies are incredible!

The meals sound tasty! The Shepherds pie sounds like a winner...as well as the ramen rescue packets. What have you tried?

Delta's Sweeet Rice pudding, Jump Start Fruit Smoothies, The Big Easy Gumbo, Texas State Fair chili, Creamy Italian Polenta, All-American Burger Wrap, Market Pasta Puttanesca, Bangers and Mash, Cheddar Jack Cheese Spread, Trailside Pinto Bean and Cheese Burrito, Breakfast Corn Chowder, Jamaican Peanut Porridge, etc. etc.

Woah...you've tried a lot! Thanks for the info!

I second the nomination of Packit Gourmet.

I wrote up all my meals on a recent six day trip, including Packit Gourmet meals, as part as a recent trip report (I am food oriented!). You can find my descriptions here (scroll down to entry for July 15, which is near the bottom of the page):

http://www.whitneyzone.com/wz/ubbthreads.php/topics/25745/Onion_Valley_Whitney_Portal_Ju#Post25745

Bob - of all the meals you've tried, are there any you didn't particularly like? I've heard great things about this company, but just curious if everything is good or some of the meals fall short?

I'll have to try the Packit Gourmet meals.

Mountain House has always been my choice for dinners. Their chicken and turkey selections, as well as beef stroganoff are my favorites.

MH has been our staple too...beef stroganoff w/ noodles and lasagna being our favorites. Last spring we were snow camping and we decided to try Backpacker's Pantry Pad Thai noodles. It was terrible! Perhaps it was just too cold, but the noodles never quite hydrated enough and had that raw uncooked flavor. It was quite spicy too.
Last night I was online looking at DYI dehydrated foods. Friends of ours have a dehydrator and I thought I'd experiment with dehydrating chicken. Has anyone tried it? A few recipes recommended canned chicken (yuck) because it produced the best results (must be all that MSG).

Akichow..great trip report! I'll have to put that route on my "to-do" list. Thanks for sharing your menu. While I was reading those dehydrating DIY articles last night, I have to admit I was a bit perplexed as to how the freezer bag was suppose to retain the heat..using the cozy makes perfect sense. My hubby and I are hiking down into the GC in October and, like you were, I'm concerned with lightening my food load. Normally we take a combo of fresh and dehydrated foods. But for this trip I'd rather carry my weight as water...i'll live without the apples and carrots for five days. I've got a question...perhaps a stupid one...what are tubes of string cheese? Are those the sticks you buy in the dairy section? If so, weren't you afraid of them spoiling? If they aren't, I'd like to know what they are because we'd love to have cheese that didn't spoil.

Hmmm...let's see. The Breakfast Corn Chowder might have been a wee bit peppery, which some folks might not like at 6 AM. But other than that, nothing bad stands out.

I just meant the same string cheese that you buy at trader joes or your local supermarket. Yes, the official line is refrigerate. And I do, at home. I do take them on multiday backpacking trips and so far no problems. But your experience may differ...one of the individual choices one must make based on personal assessment of risk. Laughing Cow sells a type of cheese product that comes in wheels and is shelf stable (no refrigeration required), also available at TJs and most grocery stores. Setting that aside, the harder and dryer the cheese, the longer it lasts without refrigeration.

Breakfast

Milkshake of Nido and instant pudding mix w/dried fruit of choice, esp berries. Nido according to recipe on can, plus half to one small jello instant per liter. When a cold stream or lake is available, I mix in a Nalgene or wide mouth Kleen canteen the night before and cache under rocks well under the surface. Yogi hasn't found it yet. Real energy zap and the shake can last into the morning on the trail.

Lunch especially the first day out: brown bread (canned, w/o the can) and cream cheese or pemmican. Pemmican is with a butter flavored shortening or same w/ bacon fat and mix & match of sunflower seeds, bacon bits, craisins, blueberries etc

All my recipes are designed for high calorie low weight packing, except for lunch and dinner on first day. I carry a little over 1 lb, maybe 1 1/4 lb per person per day, and usually have leftovers.

Second lunch choice: Gazpacho of tomato powder, red pepper, onion and garlic powder, dried celery, herbs. Mix in Nalgene in am and it rehydrates and blends on the trail. Chill 15 min in stream or lake.

Dinner: My own pasta al pesto w/ shrimp. With the excalibur home dryer, popcorn shrimp dries like freeze dry and much cheaper. Also dried pesto: a really oil rich, cheesy, garlicy tasty blend, dried like fruit leather then dry chopped in a food processor. With quick cook pasta or rice. Soak the shrimp in a ziplock or nalgene all day on the trail. The pasta or rice will cook in hot water/no boil. Do the pasta and shrimp together, leave a little water in the pot then add the pesto. Yum

Their foods look like this on the trail? Packit Gourmet

Don't knock it until you tried it, right? Will look into this further.

Tried Mountain House lasagna a couple of nights ago as an experiment to prepare for my upcoming JMT thru-hike. Loved it. Did wish they packed a bit flatter, and they are supposedly a "serves 2" size (which won't matter, since I'll easily eat the whole thing at the end of a day of hiking anyway). But it was delicious, and the whole things fixes and eats in the pack, which in theory, could be washed out and reused as a mixing package for anything else that needs mixing/shaking (i.e., water with Better Than Milk, etc.).

CaT

CaT - one tip that a lot of people use to get the MH meals to pack better is to open them and dump them into a quart size ziploc freezer bag. You can pour your hot water into the freezer bag and cook in it, just as you would the original MH bag.

When are you starting your JMT thru? Nobo or sobo?

Or open and reseal them...forcing the air out. It's not perfect, but it works.

I buy 4-serving meals, and divide them into three parts. Each one goes into a sandwich ziplock. I prepare my meals in that 600 ml Snow Peak cup. The original packaging is too bulky.