Alternatives to freezer bags (for cooking)?

I use the caddy that comes with the Caldera Cone but I have used and re-used many times the bags made for vacuum sealing food.

Packit Gourmet sells individual stand up pouches that are BPA, toxin free. There is another brand similar to the Mountainhouse pouches that is more of a paper pouch and is made for freezer bag cooking but I can’t remember the name.  Just reuse a MH pouch.

I use either my pot or my Snowpeak Ti bowl that weighs 1.9 oz.  It sits inside my 900 ml pot.  I can use it to cook with as well.  I don’t like eating out of bags and pouches. If I need hot water for a drink, I pour the water into my cup first and then use my pot for cooking and eating.

Dutchware is selling reusable stand up bowls/bags.

I don’t use one, but maybe you should try a bot with a cozy?. If you don’t want a bowl because of the weight this won’t sound better.  Freezer bags will be the lightest that I’ve heard of.

Freezer bags are exactly the same plastic as the plastic mugs, plastic bowls, plastic containers you might recycle, so you’re left with glass and metal of some kind…. Perhaps a titanium cup would be more to your liking.

I don’t want to scare you, but you’ve been eating out of the same plastic all your life… I have too. It’s all exactly the same stuff. The baby bottles Mom used, right up to every bag of chips, Chex, jerky, nuts, coffee, all of it.

What’s more, freezer bags cause exactly the same mutation rate in all hikers who pour hot water in them… we keep doing it, and keep hiking.

There are mylar bags all over Amazon to buy. It is also Polyethylene plastic, but with a polyester film over it. Food saver bags are nylon, with a polyethylene liner, because polyethylene is considered the safe thing to put food in. Foil bags are all lined with polyethylene aka the same darn plastic.

Welcome to the same journey so many have been on… got myself a Toaks titanium mug to drink out of, and rehydrate in a silicone Sea to Summit collapsible bowl these days, so I can rinse out and re-use the ziplocs for storage.

I’ve done the Mountain House thing, freeze bag thing, cup and cozy thing, and now I think I’m settling on the pot and cozy thing. For that, though, 650ml is probably a little too small. I’m using an 850ml container, and for some meals, I wouldn’t mind a bit bigger. 900-1000ml is probably about right.

Aren’t Mountain House bags lined with plastic? I have no idea what kind, though.

Is there a reason you need to transfer the water to another container instead of pouring the food into your pot?

When I repackage food I cook it in my pot. For weekend trips I just cook in the food package (e.g. Mountain house).

Yup, of you have health concerns, plastic is plastic. Some are better , but none are good. Hard anodized aluminum and Ti are the way to go. Glass is just too heavy. The Purist water containers made for cycling might be useful:  http://www.specializedwaterbottles.com/water-bottles/the-purist

That said, I think you get more chemical exposure driving to the trailhead. It would be interesting to study how organic foods are packaged on the way to the factory and the shelf packaging.

Silicone is the least leaching and most inert/stable of any of the “plastics”, though it’s more a rubber technically.

Silicone is very safe with even boiling water.  There are some research based indications that it starts to break down and leach during high oven temps, like 400 *F +, but temporary boiling water won’t bother it.

A much lighter solution than using silicone bottles or bowls, is to take some parchment paper, make a pouch out of it, and put that into a polyethylene bag.  Parchment paper is paper coated with silicone, and typically used to line baking sheets for it’s non stick properties.  It’s tough enough to be able to be reused several times in the above manner (not so much for use as baking), though it’s not as tough as the polyethylene plastic bags.

I’m a bit wary and cautious of using most plastics, especially with boiling water, but i’m confident enough in silicone to use it in that manner.  It’s very inert and stable, when not exposed to extreme stresses (extreme heat, extreme acidity or alkalinity, etc).

A great water bottle idea, imo, would be to take light/thin polypropylene plastic bottle and line it with silicone, perhaps with some foam in between.  Would be a fairly lightweight insulated bottle that is pretty safe.

I feel the same way you do. In regards to the argument about we eat from plastic all the time and it’s basically the same type of plastic. I agree, but the difference is that I’m not pouring boiling hot water into these plastic packages/containers which increases leaching. Who knows though? Maybe it’s not harmful and I’m overreacting but if it’s so easy to avoid doing it why not?

I would suggest rehydrating directly in your pot. 650 ml is too small for most meals though. I use a short/wide 900 ml ti pot and it’s the perfect size. If I’m cooking a freezer style meal I put in the required water (~1.5-2 cups) plus another 300ml for coffee. Bring it to a boil and pour out 300ml into my evernew ti cup for my coffee, then dump the dehydrated meal into my pot. I think mix it thoroughly, cover and place in my reflectix cozy. 10 mins later I eat directly from my pot and do a quick clean up. Andrew Skurka explains it on his blog too.

Flatcat Gear (Jon Fong) has Toaks 900ml Ti pots for sale. $28. Incredible deal.

I eat out of the pot. The bags stay dry. Easier to control portion size and control waste. Don’t know why there is so much opposition to washing one pot and utensil. Takes less than a minute.

So +1 with Don and Andrew.

Parchment paper is non recyclable so I dismiss that suggestion.

Dpn wrote, “In regards to the argument about we eat from plastic all the time and it’s basically the same type of plastic. I agree, but the difference is that I’m not pouring boiling hot water into these plastic packages/containers which increases leaching.”

But the manufacturers use heat on plastic lined food containers all the time. It is common sense to try to avoid the chemicals, but they are everywhere, so the few meals consumed when hiking are a pittance. Rehydrating in a pot is a good plan, but you may need a larger pot.

Andrew Skurka wrote a recent piece on why he doesn’t like freezer bag cooking and what he does as an alternative, which is basically just “make the same thing as with freezer bag but do it in a pot instead”:

http://andrewskurka.com/2016/freezer-bag-cooking-no-thank-you/

Fantastic feedback, thanks so much! You’ve made me really think more about it and it seems it’s either the silicone route, or perhaps better, eat out of the pot. I just don’t trust plastic with hot water, not for regular use and I hate adding to the disposable plastic mountain. Simplest would be to cook and eat out of the same pot. The reason I started this thread is that when hungry at the end of a trail day, the 650ml pot (as some of you have pointed out) is a little too small for a meal, I tried it. OK for soup. Shame as i really like this size of pot. So it’d either mean I carry something (ti/silicone) to pour the water into or I just bring my 900ml pot. That seems the best solution and in terms of weight and pack space it probably evens out, when compared to the 650 pot plus an extra vessel.

Out of interest, do any of you actually find a 650 /700 pot big enough for cooking (without pouring the water into another vessel)?

I hate adding to the disposable plastic mountain.

So I’ll question…will you take bulk bags of ingredients or will you package each dried meal by itself in plastic bags that you then dump into the pot? If the latter, then the plastic consumption is a wash…FWIW, I use the Pack it gourmet cook in bags and really like them. For solo trips I would be all for cooking in the pot, but I mostly hike with my wife and we like to eat different things so sharing a meal out of one pot is not an option.

At different times I’ve done both: bulk pack and individually pack dried foods -but either way I never dispose of such bags after only one use, especially if they’ve only had dried ingredients in them. I’ve got some zip lock bags that I must have used ten times! If they’ve only had things like oatmeal in them they don’t even need washing, just refilling. I feel differently about bags with hot water in though. I’ll have a look at those Pack it gourmet cook in bags!

When I hike with my partner we take a 1.3L Evernew and sidewinder set up and cook in the pot.

will you take bulk bags of ingredients or will you package each dried meal by itself in plastic bags that you then dump into the pot? If the latter, then the plastic consumption is a wash

Not necessarily a wash. For preparing the food in the freezer bag you need to use, well, a freezer bag, but if you’re just using the plastic bag for carrying so you can dump the food into your pot then you could use thinner (non-freezer) baggies. That may not save more than a gram or two per meal, but we are gram-counters after all.

I tried freezer bag eating once and have no desire to eat like that again. I will take no cook meals any day over fishing my food our of a plastic bag and for me it has nothing to do with leaching plastic. A 0.9 liter pot should be big enough to rehydrate and cook a meal for one. I use ziplock bags to carry my food in and that lets me reuse the bags . I am with Skurka : ” Freezer Bag Cooking: No Thank You”.

To avoid plastic use and packaging, this is what I recommend.

Package dry goods in bulk in paper bags.  All my breakfast/lunch/snacks are just bulk in paper bags. You could use wax paper bags if you want.  You can burn both if you want to (you can’t burn parchment).

Use plastic bags (I like smaller bags I use in board games for spice mixes) or plastic squeeze bottles for anything small or wet/oily.

If you cook, just cook in the same pot you boil water in, like Skurka says. This also gives you some more meal options, for meals that need some additional cook time after you add the boiling water.  I think the ideal is sizing up your pot, but also bringing a small Ti mug, so you can pour off some of the hot water for tea while you cook your food.

While i suggested the parchment paper in freezer bag as an alternative, i would more so 1+ the suggestion of eating out of the pot–that’s what i do.  I use an Evernew pot with ceramic non stick coating–makes cleaning it pretty easy.

I think my pot is either .9 or 1L but i’m not a hundred percent sure. It’s big enough for a meal for two people.

Seems like the 900ml is ideal. I looked at the weight – my 650ml pot is 80g while my 900ml is 115g. In real terms that weight difference is pretty small and is largely in the wide lid of the 900ml pot. So if I really wanted to cut the extra weight I could make a foil lid which would bring the weight of the two pots within spitting distance of each other. And at the end of the day what’s 35g difference if the cooking and eating experience is better?

The factor to remember with most freezer bag cooking is that it is used as a fuel saving technique. As with packaged dehydrated meals, it is a boil water and soak with a cozy technique. They allow using better foods and cutting costs as well.  So many of the packaged meals have a great deal of salt— like 1200mg per serving. That equals a whole day’s allotment for someone on a low sodium diet. You can certainly make a cozy and use a metal pot instead.