Why we dehydrate and prepare our own meals

As we start heading towards backpacking season, I figured it was time to talk about dehydrating your own food. A week or two ago Gina Begin asked around about what we did and why for this #TeamSierra post on Dehydrating your own camp meals at the Sierra Trading Post.My wife pulled out a complete article explaining our journey in dehydration, so I figured I’d share it.

Please feel free to weigh in with your experience.

Well… our favorite dehydrated food over-the-hills-and-far-away is home-made biltong (South-African-style jerky). We also LOVE upside-down pizza (http://www.theoutdooradventure.net/2013/02/deconstructed-trail-pizza-for-a-crowd/), adding cubes of organic all-natural chicken stock, dried sausage, and dehydrated veggies to instant brown rice, quinoa, or instant Idaho potato mash (one variation: http://www.theoutdooradventure.net/2013/03/trail-cooking-quinoa-sausage-soup-for-a-crowd/), and high-protein gluten-free homemade pancake mix with brown sugar.

The chicken chilli and bean chilli recipes I used for our family camping trip were both from A Fork In The Road or Another Fork In The Road. The chicken recipe was tasty, but I think next time I’ll just make my favourite bean chilli recipe (ground beef dehydrated separately), dehydrate that, and serve it over instant brown rice.

I read somewhere that pretty much any stew, chilli, or sauce can be dehydrated. I had trouble dehydrating oily sauces, for example, a sauce containing coconut milk (disaster!). We also had trouble reconstituting stews with bits in it larger than a small bean; it took longer than we were willing to wait. I suppose that this could be solved by using a thermos and starting the reconstituting process in the morning so that it is ready by the evening, but that seems to be going against the point of light-weight, low-bulk foods.

I suppose my main motivations for preparing the meals myself are:

1. I feel like I’m saving money,
2. I know that the food is higher-quality,
3. I know exactly what I’m feeding my family,
4. I feel like I’m being more eco-friendly by cutting down on packaging, and
5. because I like the challenge of learning new things!

For these reasons, I feel like it is definitely worth it. Yes, it did take very careful planning to make sure everything was dehydrated in time. I started about 10 days before our 3-day family trip and used a spreadsheet to plan out the use of the dehydrator. Some things take more than 12 hours to dehydrate properly, like mango roll-ups for example.

When Paul goes out on his own, or if we went without the kids, I feel like we would use pre-packaged meals more often, because it would be less cost-prohibitive and it would feel special, like as if we were going out to a restaurant. 😉