backpacking food

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Look around.

http://www.trailcooking.com/
Sarah (the owner) is my heroine! No-fuss meals, no dishes to wash, so much more appetizing and nourishing than Mountain House sawdust!

Why don't you bring more high-calorie food?

Freeze dried meals are modestly nutritious, but generally not high in calories. Read the label. Ramen is not that nutritious, but has lots of calories. Dried fruit is good for quick energy, but it is not huge on calories.

A friend of mine eats a big breakfast, eggs and bacon and all that, then a second breakfast halfway through the morning. That is some sort of full fat powdered milk drink.

Whatever you cook in the evening, add some olive oil to that. And cheese! A proper backpacker can't be expected to go for more than a couple of days without a good hard cheese or some salami.

–B.G.–

Looking at your food list, and depending on how many nuts you are eating, it's probably not more than 2000 kcal total per day. You're probably burning 4000+ per day, so no wonder you're running out of gas.

Suggestions:

I like flour tortillas with peanut butter or Nutella, sprinkled with high-fat granola for some crunch. And eat that high-fat, high protein homemade granola for breakfast, with some dried fruit, nuts, and powdered whole-fat milk (Nido.) Add olive oil to your ramen noodles and your dinner. Or, better yet make your own dinners so you can control the calories and the sodium content. The freezerbagcooking web site is excellent.

First: +1 for Sarah.

Second: my thoughts.

Looking at your list, the first thing that strikes me is that so much of it is pre-packaged, pre-made, stuff. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, it never leads to good meals (in my experience). Why not make your own? You'd be surprised at how easy it is to find shelf-stable, lightweight ingredients at a supermarket. Look over a cookbook or two (or a… food blog), and adapt the recipes a little to what you have on hand. You can make your own freeze-dried dishes, too, using staples available from online sources. My favorite is packitgourmet.com.

If you have a dehydrator, you can dry your own fruits/vegetables (fresh or canned), as well as sauces, condiments, noodles and rice you've cooked at home. A solid investment, IMO.

Make up your dishes at home, and you can use freezer-bag cooking techniques, saving fuel, cleaning time/soap carried in your pack, reducing the size of your cook pot since all you'd do is boil water, etc.

Some of my favorite DIY meals on the trail are: peanut butter, crackers, salmon in a foil packet, oatmeal, salami, dried potatoes, cous cous, nuts, chocolate. Most of those are pretty calorie dense. The salmon is not that high in calories, but I just like it on the trail. It doesn't take long for MH meals to start tasting like their ingredient list reads.

Salmon packets might not be high in calories but they are good dense protein and really good for us (all those healthy oils!). I am a firm believer in them and also oil packed tuna (you can get it in packets as well now)
Parmesan cheese and olive oil. Ground nuts. All things I love in meals! Full fat Nido milk in the morning in my breakfasts or coconut cream powder…..
I have been dehydrating like crazy the past few weeks – been focusing on it on the blog as well!

Sarah, last time I was out, I packed salmon and virtually (not literally) inhaled it as soon as I opened it after about 5 days out. Sometimes your body just knows what it needs.

I packed a bunch of commercially sold dehydrated meals my first backpacking trip out and knew right away something had to change. I bought a dehydrator and now just dehydrate my favorite meals for my lunches (Chili Mac and White Chicken Chili are awesome) by just adding boiling water to the freezer bag I packed them in. Quick, no fuss, delicious. I used to save the hot meal for dinner but switching to lunch made for a nice mid-day break and great calories to keep going farther than I would have otherwise.

It looks like you need to snack more throughout the day. I eat my favorite GORP (raisons, M&M's, peanuts, dried cranberries) all day long for instant carbs and energy. Also be sure to add carbs to one of your bottles, like powdered Gatorade. That made a big difference for me as well. Lastly, stop and get your feet up in the air 2-3 times a day. Sometimes its not your food but your need to just get off your feet a bit. I pack the Nano 7 hammock for rest stops. Its up in seconds and it relieves pressure off of my back (I'm old and rusty) and rejuvinates my feet.

Thanks for the suggestion! I think ill give up on the mountain house meal, look into dehydrating food. The online dehydrating and freezer bag references have a lot of information.

Thanks for a pushing in the right direction.

Most of the stuff you are eating is going to give you a quick spike then fade.

oatmeal for breakfast will last you til noon. Milk powder in the oatmeal will add protein. Olive oil has 250 calories per ounce, nothing you carry can give you more calories per ounce, and it's fat, which your body really likes, doesn't give you that sugar spike thing. I've never found anything better than oatmeal for long lasting energy and quality. Toss in whatever else you are already eating as well and it will taste better, I use dried apples, tastes good.

John Muir brought dried, whole wheat (I'm sure it was whole wheat, probably was no real other option then) bread, that is very good, as long as you pick very heavy breads, not the wonder bread stuff that is lightly tan colored. That's very good.

I used to decades ago bring one pouch of freeze dried food with me as an emergency extra day food, after some years I tossed realizing I hated that stuff, never ate it.

I basically just dry all the ingredients on a dehydrator then bring them all as bulk foods, works great, make a sort of thick stew every night, it tastes good, it's real ingredients, it's not oversalted like that commmercial stuff, and it actually tastes pretty much like real food. Just costs whatever the food costs to make, plus the time to dehydrate it.

Fats are key though, very easy to forget when thinking dry, but they, as liquid, hold the most caloric value of anything you can bring, 1 oz for breakfast, maybe some on dried bread or mixed in, for lunch, and 1 oz for dinner, or more, that's probably right there almost 1/2 of what you are currently eating per day, plus the real food.

"the mountain house meal"

What I do sometimes is to start with a Mountain House package meal. Then I augment it with instant rice, dehydrated quinoa, or couscous. Add a dollop of olive oil and a touch of dehydrated barbecue sauce for flavor. After a while, I may have doubled the calorie count. It is hard to go wrong with olive oil.

Air dehydrated fruit cocktail is good. I can eat it right out of the bag or add it to GORP as a snack. I can simmer it with water, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and it becomes a dessert. I can spoon it hot into the middle of a pancake or egg crepe for breakfast.

Multiple-use, you know.

–B.G.–

I carry 1 ounce packets of coconut oil, walnut butter, macadamia butter, and pecan butter, all from Artisana. A bit more expensive, but VERY convenient. Also, chocolate, Nido full fat milk powder, and crushed nuts like almonds, cashews, pine nuts, pistachios, etc, make great, high calorie additions to a backpacking diet.

If you find that boredom hits you, try spices.

Mexican and Indian food recipes work. Some are somewhat basic.

For the past few trips I have used Packit Gourmet meal kits for all meals, they are far better than Mountian House manure.
I also pack gorp, breakfast bars, crackers, summer sausage, cheese and some chocolate.

Not to beat a dead horse, but adding olive oil is an easy, easy way to bump up the energy. Works in lunches and dinners especially well, and in a few breakfasts, thought I don't like it in my oatmeal.

I'm ALL about the butter- bring a stick of butter with you and add it whenever you can. I love it in my oatmeal in the morning- a whole daggon' tablespoon of it.

Yah, that's right, grandma taught me well.

Seems like adding more fats is the way to go.

I love both butter and olive oil……and I like my oats either with butter and something sweet, or with olive oil and salt and pepper. Lately ( over a month now) I have been eating the latter every day!

ewwww… olive oil in your oatmeal? hmm. That's like eating a peanut butter and sardine sandwich. :P

Savory oats can be tasty!! They are good!

"That's like eating a peanut butter and sardine sandwich."

Now that is truly yucky. Why ruin a perfectly good sardine sandwich with peanut butter when you could spread some nice, runny Limburger and a slice of sweet onion on it, and elevate it to the sublime? As for oatmeal with olive oil, salt and pepper, oooooh yeah! Maybe cooked in broth with a dusting of Parmigiano Reggiano. Sigh. Forgive us, Katharina. We are still a young culture.

A new twist is to mix some wasabe into your penut butter.

There's wasabe green peas. almonds, chips, etc.

I use lbs. of wasabe powder a month.

Here bear, here bear, try some nice penut butter?

I too like the idea of cooking and dehydrating entire meals at home. But usually, reality intervenes: There is plenty else to do to get ready for a given backpacking trip, without adding a bunch of pre-trip cooking projects to the mix.

There is a happy medium, whereby you can pack a homemade meal without spending a lot of time on it. Here are some staples for me, each of which requires no pre-cooking and little or no dehydrating:

1. Couscous and lentils, with sundried tomatoes and some flavoring for the couscous (often bullion cubes and/or a dried soup packet). I take 1.5 hours to soak the lentils in camp before cooking them though. Lentils have protein and some amazing minerals that are otherwise hard to get while in the backcountry.

2. Instant rice and tempeh with a few tamari-flavored almonds and Asian flavoring. Tempeh is excellent protein. (You do have to dehydrate the tempeh.) The Asian flavoring can come in a supermarket flavor packet. If you are ambitious, you can pick a sauce and dehydrate it; I sometimes do that but then you are talking about more work.

3. Pasta. This seems to be the easiest to prepare at home; its downside is that there is no obvious lightweight protein source to add. (Sometimes I will add a salmon or tuna packet, but per-calorie they weigh a lot.) Angel hair pasta seems to cook fastest. For flavor, add supermarket pasta flavor packet such as four-cheese, or a tube of pesto sauce. Lazy alternative is to bring ramen, or mac-n-cheese straight out of the box (bring some fresh cheese to add in the field). Pasta does require more fuel in the field.

4. Instant potatoes. I have moved away from this one because I've had trouble settling on a protein and a flavoring that goes well with potatoes.

What I do consistently dehydrate ahead of time are veggies. Onions, green garlic, broccoli are the most consistently used, they go with any meal. Also kale, red peppers, asparagus. I buy the veggies here and there in the spring and summer when they are in season (e.g. asparagus in April; green garlic in May; red peppers in August), dehydrate them, and stick them in the freezer in very good freezer bags. Selections of veggies then come with me on every trip and are added to every meal. I pre-soak them in camp so that they rehydrate better.

I find that dehydrating veggies and tempeh only (not entire meals) is more realistic for me because I can sneak in a dehydrating session for in-season veggies on a slow Saturday now and then. Without having to do any complex meal planning.

– Elizabeth

EDIT: I can no longer recommend Sunrise bars after finding out that the "whole sustagrain barley flour" in them is a ConAgra genetically modified plant species.

I don't know how many people know about these, but they are FANTASTIC trail food. I usually have a morning drink of some sort with these, some dried mangos and maybe a few chunks of dried capola sausage. They are a little fragile, but will store for a very long time. They are very tasty despite the sound of their ingredient list…hard to eat only one.

Sunrise Bars

The Amazon price is a ripoff, but they are sold in the same big tub at Costco for $8 I believe it is.

130 calories

2 grams protein

Ingredients are:
rolled oats,whole sustagrain barley flour, cranberries,raisins, dried apples, apricots,almonds,walnuts,flax seeds,sunflower seeds,whole grain flour,cashews,sesame seeds,shredded coconut,nonhydrogenated canola oil, unsalted butter,brown sugar,honey,salt,baking soda,tapioca syrup,natural flavor,cinnamon.