Cold Meals

[Ryan Luke]

I am doing a quick 3 day, 2 night trip next week. I wanted to leave the stove behind and eat cold food for dinner. Anyone got any good suggestions for meals? I am partial to instant hummus, so meals including this would work well.

[Anonymous]

Hi Ryan,
There are lots of different bars on the market, e.g. Organic Food Bar(several varieties), Raw Revolution Bar, the venerable Pemmican Bar. Also a multitude of nuts, dried fruits, nut butters, cheese or sesame sticks, chocolate bars, to mention a few options. Starting with these, you should be able to come up with an evening meal of around 1500-1600 calories for around 12 oz., without getting bored. Lots of other options, I'm sure but these are some of my mainstays when going cold food. Good luck.

[Nathaniel Hein]

My wife and I like to make burritos. We use flat bread tortillas, dehydrated salsa, dehydrated cabbage, spices, parmasean cheese. We hydrate them with cold water about 2 hours before we want to eat. Works well, very filling, fairly light.

[Ryan Luke]

That sounds interesting. Do you dehydrate your own food or purchase it?

[Steve .]

This link has some options for no cook meals (scroll down a bit).

[Nathaniel Hein]

Dehydrate, much more economical and very easy. Another favorite is dehydrating canned chicken with instant cous cous and taboli, let it rehydrate a couple hours before. You should check out Sarah Kirkconnell's website on Freezer Bag Cooking, very cool, many recipes you do not need to cook on the trail. Just got her book too and it also looks excellent. Additionally, you may also want to check out "Lip Smackin' Backpacking" also another very good book on easy to do recipes, not all of which require cooking on the trail.

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

Instant hummus on tortillas with anything from salsa packets added to ranch dip added. Willing to carry cucumber? Very good added!
Wraps made with chicken pouches are great. I like it with mayo packets, curry powder, Craisins and sometimes I use chewy dried apples.
Peanut butter and Nutella wraps. Craisins added are great.
Make pasta salads with plain ramen noodles (that recipe is on my website, under lunches), dried vegetables and dressing of choice.
Lots of options :-)

[James Pitts]

I have tried the "no cook" thing on occasion. What I found was that food needs to be eaten… and an excessively repetitive/unappetizing meal plan saps my appetite (cook or no cook). So it's good to talk about this and come up with lots of ideas for no-cook meals you like to eat and with enough variety that you will want to eat them. There are certainly lots of appetizing options as this thread proves. Also, I hate packing out even a crumb of food!

[Will Rietveld]

I'm glad to see that our website gets visited occasionally. We have neglected it since we started working for BPL, sorry.

I got on a no-cook kick back in 2001 and tested all sorts of things to see what would re-hydrate in cold water, and taste good. The real challenge was dinners – it was hard to create no-cook meals that actually tasted good. Most tasted ok, but not good, and several were wretched. I did a section hike on the CDT for 7 days going no cook, and had a hard time getting some of my meals down. The worst was falafel – way too spicy.

Now I mainly go no-cook on shorter (1-2 night) trips, where carrying a stove is more redundant and I want to go SUL. Breakfast and lunch are easy, but dinner is the challenge.

The various nutritional shakes are great for breakfast, and I add a teaspoonful of instant coffee to it to get my caffeine fix. Granola with powerded milk added is also good.

The nutritional shake plus instant coffee is really fast to drink so I can get going early in the morning. The one I like best is EAS Myoplex, its tasty and has lots of nutrients and protein. However, there are loads of nutritional shakes in any health foods store to choose from.

For dinner, I like hummus and crackers, or hummus and instant potatoes, or instant potatoes plus dehydrated refried beans and cheese powder, or dehydrated pea soup. I don't take things like tortillas and pouch meats because the extra weight is counter-productive to going no-cook.

Will

[Kim Grant]

It's probably a little too late for my comments to be useful for the original request… but I just love to talk about food.

Thus far my preferred no-cook meals are something like the plate of specialities I get at my faviorite mid-eastern restaurant. I like to graze by piling bits of flavors on a pita in bite size portions. I'll pack chicken jerkey, hummus, cheese, salami, dried cherries and apples. Then I'll make one bite of salami with cheese, another with hummus and salami, or all three, or dried apple with a slice of cheese, and so forth. The point is that with all the taste combinations I stay interested in eating this for lunch and dinner for a few days in a row.

I find that PB&J or bars, while good for instant energy, don't keep me going for more than an hour or so before I feel hungry again. I've abandonded oatmeal and grapenuts breakfasts completely and now carry freeze dried bacon and eggs. There is a 20gm protein bar by Cliff that's pretty good, too.

As a side note…. I was interested to read that several of the backpacker's pantry and mountain house meals don't require hot water. "Add 1 cup hot or cold water…."

-Kim

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

Alpine Air makes a couple cold meals as well, a tuna salad and a chicken salad. I ate the chicken one I think 6 years ago, and it actually was pretty decent (though salty). Easy to prep as well.

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