As part of our preparations for our Appalachian Trail hike, we decided to prepare some of our own trail food. This is a good way of cutting some of the costs of food while we’re out on the trail. Pre-packaged, dehydrated or freeze-dried backpacking meals usually cost about $6 per serving. By prepping our own food, we can bring that cost per serving down considerably, as well as get to choose our own variety.
We purchased a Food Dehydrator
It all starts with a pot of chili. This was last night’s dinner… a nice pot of sweet potato and black bean chili. We’ve started making extra large batches of the usual soups and chilis that we’d make for dinner and drying the leftovers.
Next, we scoop the chili out onto the food dehydrator trays. You’ll see in the picture that we’ve got some Fruit Roll Sheets
Next, we just put the top on the dehydrator, plug it in and set it to 135 deg.
About 8 hours later, this is what it looks like…
After breaking up the larger pieces, a few more hours, and we’ve got dehydrated chili.
We can now pack it into a couple of vacuum bags, and seal them up.
The end result is two bags of lightweight, homemade food. Ready to be rehydrated out on the trail!
It does seem like a lot of work, but our dehydrator can fit up to 12 trays, and each tray can fit about 1.5 servings of food. So we can create almost a week’s worth of dinners in one drying session.
Of course this homemade dried food will only supplement other trail food. We still plan on bringing along some of our tried and true items like ramen, mac and cheese, tuna pouches, and granola.
Our next step in planning food will be to plan out some mail drops… but we’ll save that for another post.
