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Thread: Hiking food recipes and meals

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    Hiking food recipes and meals

    I'm preparing myself for a season of hiking after a long hiatus. I'm curious from those that are into hiking and camping what are your favourite meals on the trails. Interested in recipes for meals that you make yourself (as opposed to dehydrated packet meals) and conversely interested in opinions on the dehydrated meals. Have people found a dehydrated meal combination that is nice (greater than mere tolerable).

    I'm interested in how you package the meals i.e. vacuum sealing etc, and if you have worked out a way to take luxuries like chorizo (or any meat product) sans refrigeration.

    To be clear i'm not interested in recipes suitable for car camping unless the recipe is equally applicable for a multi day hike and weight is a factor in the meal plan.

    cheers MLD

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    I got the impression purchased packets of dried food are pretty terrible but if you have a dehydrator yourself it's a totally different story.

    I look forward to seeing comments from someone who has a dehydrator.
    - Justin

    '95 Disco 300TDI - sold
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    I used to do a lot of hiking and I never found those dehydrated meals palatable at all. Particularly when you were having to prepare them with water of uncertain quality that had been chemically treated. Mmmmm, mashed potato and chlorine, my favourite!

    I did find that the ready meals that came in a foil pouch to be the best compromise between weight and taste.

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    Quote Originally Posted by sheerluck View Post
    I did find that the ready meals that came in a foil pouch to be the best compromise between weight and taste.
    Do you mean a microwave type meal? That's an idea, the lean cuisine type meal. Next question, where did you plug in the microwave?

    If it's a different type to the microwave meal, is there a brand name or another description i can use to google it.

    I got all excited about a dehydrator and looked at Sunbeam's version. Good for fruit and solid foods. The design wouldn't work for a wet dish.

    I have a vacuum sealer. That sorts out the packaging for a wet dish. It doesn't address weight. I was fearful that i'd be eating cous cous with whatever on a daily basis.

    If Amazon can deliver packages by drone, they could do a meal food drop to remote hikers. Great business idea with little commercial demand. Forgive me, it's Friday afternoon.

    MLD

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    I have found the range of Happy Camper Gourmet single serve meals great for both extended 4WD trips & hiking. They are not dehydrated, do not need refrigeration or freezing, & can easily be reheated in just boiling water in the bag - I just use a Jetboil - they also keep for 18 months or so.

    If you order on line when they have a sale which is quite often they work out very reasonably priced & if a big order arrive packaged in a large bucket, which is handy. I supplement these with potatoes for the stews or rice/pasta for some of the other recipes - Lamb Shanks are very nice. A lot of the single serve rice products can be cooked in the bag as well which is handy, & if you are feeling real tired & lazy just eat them out of the bag, just the fork to wash then

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    I bought SWMBO a dehydrator a while back and the short version of my research is buy the Excalibur Food Dehydrator. Seemed to crap all over the rest of them. Quite pricey, but the reviews are all excellent. We haven't done whole meals in it, but what fruit and veg drying we've done, it's been really good.
    - Justin

    '95 Disco 300TDI - sold
    '86 County 110 Isuzu
    2006 Range Rover Vogue td6

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    My run of the mill dehydrator has a slippery plastic tray for wet foods, stick it on the bottom shelf and hope the stuff above isn't too drippy! Good for fruit rollups, apparently good for spaghetti etc but i've not tried it yet. Chunks of chorizo would be fine on the mesh trays anyway.

    Jerky, added to boiling water, makes the best stock ever. Way better than that vegetable derived pseudo-beef stock from stupormarkets, or those little salty cubes. A nugget goes a long way in a pot of pasta or rice. Just be careful of salt intake with jerky.

    Salami/pepperoni etc are popular amongst my caving mates to make a bland meal worth eating, albeit fairly dense/weighty.

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    Quote Originally Posted by MLD View Post
    Do you mean a microwave type meal? That's an idea, the lean cuisine type meal. Next question, where did you plug in the microwave?

    If it's a different type to the microwave meal, is there a brand name or another description i can use to google it.....
    Similar to those microwave type meals, yes, but they are not refrigerated, and warm up fine in a pan of hot water. You'd probably find them in the soup aisle at Woolies.

    Another alternative is those Uncle Ben's pouches of ready to heat rice. Come in different flavours and weigh little.

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    I forgot about the uncle bens rice packets. i used those for making lunch at work for a short while. They come in 125g and 250g. I might buy one and see what the packaged weight is. Rice and dried jerky, mmmmm feast fit for a king.

    MLD

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    The other point against those dehydrated meals is that if you have an issue with cooking (fire ban, too windy, cooker out of fuel.....) you don't eat.

    At least with the stuff in the pouches, you can eat them unheated.

    And yes, I did get caught out with that. One night high in the hills in the Lake District in England, it was blowing so hard that my mate's tent poles snapped, and we couldn't keep a gas stove lit enough to warm water up to eat.

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