sauces for dinner (pre-made)

"- (also) recommended – a small platypus as a sauce vessel."

Thanks for the new sauces to try out!

Are you dehydrating the sauces or packing them wet?

Dan

These were prepared, packed, carried, and consumed "wet".

What kind of weights are attributed to the sauce totals, and what kind of breakdown per meal are you using? Were there containers for each meal, or a bulk container for the total sauce recipe?
They look delicious!

I can vouch for them…they were delicious. Mike had a platy loaded with the stuff (both PESTO and the THAI PEANUT), we all fought for them (Mike made them on the 9/2009 BPL light backpacking course). I can’t recall the size of the platy he used, maybe a .5 liter? So we all divvied it up from the Platy. I don’t remember the weight (guessing maybe 10-12oz. but it fed 7).
I went ahead and made the Pesto for a 3 day Smokey Mountain trip this November (man it was cold up on Gregory’s Bald) and we mixed it with couscous and crushed pasta shells. My only criticism, if I could find one is that the oil makes for one heck of an effort to clean your eating vessel; a small price to pay for such a delicious meal in the back country.
My only mistake in the preparation was adding way too much garlic. Luckily we were out in the woods and the trees did not mind much.

Sorry to be ignorant but what is Ramona? It's listed in the pesto.

Donna- cheese. romano.

Thanks for the recipes, Mike! These look great! Shoot, I might even make a couple up and use them at home…

Thanks, Brad. These look great. Looks like the rain coming Sunday will keep me in the kitchen. : )

Could these be used freezer bag style?

…how much the Thai peanut sauce weighs…penalty worth paying.

On the FBC question, sure – since the sauces are premade. If you make your starch in a bag you can tuck the bag of sauce next to it in your cozy to heat it up a bit. Then toss with the starch (be it rice or pasta….)

I have done similar with a Thai inspired peanut sauce I make/carry and served tossed with baked ramen.

Great honk, each of these recipes makes a lot! I just made the middle eastern, the pesto, and the mole. Note: I cut way back on the salt and used 1 TB of salt in the middle eastern, 1 ts in the pesto, and 1 TB in the mole. They tasted plenty salty to me with the lesser amounts. The middle eastern was an interesting new taste for me, and probably my favorite of the 3.

I also highly recommend Mike's Pesto & Thai Peanut sauces. I was part of the 2-week LDB class and we never tired of the 2 sauces. Yes, they may increase your food weight a little, but it's really worth it at dinner time! We had couscous, pasta and instant mashed potatoes to add the sauces to.

This concept works really well for car camping trips, too. Just throw a bottle of your favorite sauce in the cooler. You won't want to eat out!

These were awesome on the Wind River trip. I made a batch of the pesto sauce (from the groovy-biotic article before this link with quantities went up) in preparation for a trip that was supposed to be this weekend. I thought I better test it beforehand, since I was making up the quantities, so I tried it with cous cous one night for dinner. It was so good, and the wife liked it so much that later in the week, she 'made' it again for dinner, over quinoa with some fresh broccoli mixed in. I need to make the bulk versions, I suspect it will become a 'frontcountry' favorite.

Yes, these are salty.

THe reason for the extra salt is to act as a preservative if you need to carry this stuff for two weeks in the host summer sun. The recipes have a lot of salt, vinagar and hot spices to keep 'em from spoiling. I've carried these for 12 days with no bad results…

Feel free to spice 'em to your own taste.

These have been VERY popular. I watched a student named Catalina drinking the peanut sauce on the trail like sports goo!

I made the Thai peanut sauce and I think maybe overcooked the onions. But….it really does need lots of oil. And, I didn't find it sweet enough so I threw in honey to taste and now I really like it. Peanut butter and honey just are made for each other. Yum!

These sauce recipies look yummy. Thanks for posting them!

For long term access to these recipes, it would be best to put them on the wiki, under the recipes page.

I just wanted to thank you again, Mike!, for these wonderful sauce recipes. I've made the mideastern one twice already and alternate that one with the Thai one for lunches at work and for dinner. I've even put them on toast for breakfast. They're so satisfying, and they can revive any meal. I haven't taken them on a backpack trip yet, but occasionally on day hikes I'll take a little as a dip for crackers or smear some on a pita bread.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, do a search in the Articles section for Mike's Groovy Biotic Cooking article from a few years ago. The polenta is terrific, especially with one of the sauces. The sauces are actually mentioned in the article, but not the amounts of the ingredients. So this thread helps.

What? No mushrooms? Sorry, was just being saucy… lol.

Now in all seriousness… what a great bunch of recipes. I'll have to give them a try sometime.

If I wanted to make the sauces and add them to pastas etc and then dehydrate them and make individual meals for FBC I would back off on the salt. Should I do the same with the vinegar?

I wouldn't. The vinegar is also an important part of the taste, in addition to the preservability, and is not too strong to need cutting back.

Great looking recipies. I've made things similar to a couple of them, but I've never thought that they would keep for 12-13 days. Mike, can you provide some more detail about what conditions you've kept them in? I'm wondering how well they'd work in the late summer in the Sierras, with a possibility of routine 90 degree days.

Because I'm skittish, whenever I've done (vegan) pesto like this, I start with it frozen. Works well if you're meeting folks at the trailhead–we often have a cooler for ingredients for a "real" meal the night before anyway, and then the sauces can be frozen and stay chilled in your pack for most of the first day, at least.

Vinegar is dilute acetic acid (bp ca. 120 deg C), I think ca. 3%. If you try to dehydrate it, it will either evaporate completely or leave a residue of a higher concentration of acetic acid that may cause acidic decomposition of some other ingredient or the packaging.

Why not just carry a bit of vinegar in a dropper bottle.

Anyone try freezing these then defrosting and bringing out on the trail? Do they freeze ok? Seems like they should. How would freezing effect their shelf life after defrosting?