Appalachian Vegan Food Prep

Are you OK with eating the same meals day in and out, week after week? I know a lot of guys can do it.

The other is, you are very nut centric (which is OK) so I would ditch the Larabars. All they are is nuts and fruit. You’d do just as good to just take dried fruit with your nuts.

Creamed coconut is good, however you can get packets of vegan friendly coconut milk powder now, on Amazon. We use it all the time. It is easier to deal with – and is clean ingredients.

Do you eat like this at home? Or not? What is the base of Garden of Life protein (is it pea?) Just thoughts to ponder is all.

We use hemp seeds – they are considerably cleaner than peanuts. Dump the PB2. It is NOT good for you. Peanuts are not good for anyone IMO. They are one of the dirtiest crops you can consume. Peanuts can also encourage inflammation.

The last is will your cashew flour stay fresh in heat? It is nothing more than ground cashews, if they are raw, they will go bad if kept stored in a hot area, for mail drops. It should be kept chilled for long term storage.

Some of these recipes look quite tasty, so thanks for posting!

I see you plan to have a loaf of bread with some of your meals. My experience has been that bread is quite bulky to pack, and only very dense breads can survive for more than a few hours in the pack without getting squished flat.  Finding appropriate types of bread could be pretty challenging in some of the smaller trail towns. A lot of the specialty breads will probably be preservative-free, which is good in some respects, but they may start growing mold pretty quickly if the weather is hot and humid.  Have you considered substituting some sort of cracker?

You can get small packets of olive oil from minimus.biz.  It’s a pretty expensive way to get oil if you’re using a lot of it, but it is convenient.  I understand there are a few sections of the trail where resupply options are quite limited, so having some packets to throw in the supply box for those areas might be helpful.

Walt

I tried to make enough meals that I could go over a week without eating the same thing for dinner. The only thing that kind of concerns me is the lack of breakfast variety, but honestly I eat the same thing for breakfast everyday of the week at home. Avo Toast and a smoothie. Almost a year without a change, so I think three breakfasts should be fine.

Honestly, I put in the Larabars to round out that Misc Snack Meal to 1000 calories. Just wanted to the numbers to look good so I will give this some real consideration.

I’ll look up the coconut milk powder, I heard some negative reviews flavor-wise but I was also questioning creamed coconut in hot weather. I don’t wanna lose those fat calories though.

Yes, these meals are mostly dehydrated versions of food I already eat at home. A little something lost in translation, but I remember by the end of the first week of my 600 mile section I thought Knorr Rice Sides and summer sausage was gourmet and if you told me dirt had calories I would’ve eaten it too.

Will check out the price differences for the hemp vs peanuts. We aren’t going full Skippy or anything, usually spring for organic when a crop is notoriously dirty. It’s never caused me inflamation issues before but I will keep it in my mind.

Do you think dehydrating the cashew flour would solve that problem? I can probably get away with regular flour I just use it as a thickener for the sauce.

Those meals with the bread loaves, and some of the more complex ingredients, will definitely be “first night out of town meals”, so I’m not carrying the bread (or bags of chips) for longer than necessary.

Almost every convenience store I ended up in at least had those 6oz bottles of olive oil, so I’m not worried on that account, may still buy a couple of those packets for emergencies though.

I’ve been a vegan and/or vegetarian backpacker for the last 44 years and I even hiked the AT on occasion for various section hikes.  My main diet at the time was whatever I could get in trail towns and still remain vegetarian. (Oatmeal was a mainstay along with trail-picked wild edibles like violets and chickweed etc). The vegan option really is a challenge when resupplying from towns—as cheese is a big component of an interesting backpacking diet when you’re a vegetarian.

For the last several years I’ve been backpacking with vegan foods and have developed an elaborate process to supply me with dehydrated meals on my long 18 to 24 day trips—without resupply.

I used to rely heavily on cook brown rice and dehydrated at home until I discovered such rice contains the highest levels of arsenic—so I switched to home-cooked and home-dehydrated Quinoa—excellent!

I am currently drying a batch of food for my next 20 day trip and have a 10 tray TSM dehydrator to make meal prep quick.  Some of my food ideas can be found here—

https://tipiwalter.smugmug.com/keyword/kitchen/

The secret to home prep backpacking food is to use a blender along with a dehydrator.  Examples—

**  Blend up cooked beans with organic soups like tomato and butternut squash—adding water to keep the blender running smoothly.  Pour this mix onto your trays and dry and ziplock.

**  Blend up beans or soups with cooked quinoa and dry on tray sheets.

**  Bake many sweet potatoes and mash on trays and dry—Or add them to your blender meals and dry. Etc.

In addition, I am heavily into various nut butters as mentioned on this thread.  Almond and cashew butter are my faves—along with healthy organic peanut butter.  I pack these in plastic jars—

Here I am at the start of a 21 day trip showing my nut butter containers—all plastic and light.

Here is organic sweet potato soup after drying and ready for the ziploc.

You can also get store bought burritos and slice them and dry and eat as snacks on the trail.

And don’t forget drying up your tomatoes.

Some good ideas Tipi! 21 Days of food on your back is no joke!

I was trying to avoid the dehydrator as much as possible as I’m hoping to be out there in about a month. All this stuff I’m buying dehydrated and putting together. I wonder if it’s all dehydrated rice that contain arsenic or just Uncle Ben’s and the like. I hope Harmony House and others will be a little more pure.

I gotta know about the cheese you’ve got in that link. It looks like Chao, the Field Roast brand? How did you manage that on day three? I’ve taken Chao on day hikes and had it sweating with the corners dried out by the end of the day. Granted when I was eating real cheese it was the same. As long as it taste good and doesn’t make you sick, I guess.

Edit: Curious about the pack life of that tempeh and some of that other faux meat as well. You appear to be hiking in pretty cold weather, I’m wondering if you’d take that stuff along for warmer weather hikes and how well you’ve had it last.

I’ve found hiking gives a lot of leeway with diet.

Sweating is pretty normal for both real and vegan cheese :) A few days is fine with it.

And I should apologize for my intense hatred of peanuts ;-) I used to eat a lot of them. Loved them. Then my last kid came along….and he ended in the ER with his first exposure to them, with anaphylaxis. It wasn’t until after all the testing…and we removed peanuts out of our diet I realized I can’t tolerate them either (it was shocking really). I would always get flushed in the face after eating PB and never connected it, until I realized it was an allergic symptom. We went to hemp – only from Canada – because he can’t have any tree nuts or sunflower as well. For those worried, hemp won’t cause you to fail a drug test, if eaten in normal amounts.I love their buttery flavor. Fortunately, I can get them locally in big bags at a decent price. Small bags are not cheap though. Amazon is a good source as well. Just make sure it is from Canadian grown. (The US isn’t allowed to grow it for food)

Addison—What works for winter foodwise also works for summer—although my Ezekiel bread loaves tend to mold quicker—the cinnamon raisin loaf lasts the longest time, btw.

Chao is a good vegan cheese although oddly it has zero protein, strange for something made of soy.  I keep it in ziplocs and it doesn’t seem to spoil.  Regular cheese never really goes bad—I’ve seen wilderness trip leaders in fact most prize the mold that grows on their cheese.

But I am mildly allergic to dairy cheese and will get sinus infections if I continue to eat the stuff.  A little bit goes a long way.  My fave is organic cheddar goat cheese.

Tempeh lasts forever until the package is opened (shrink-wrapped) and then it lasts forever in the winter and 4 or 5 days in the summer.  I like my tempeh sandwiches for lunch with my eggless mayonnaise which lasts for a whole trip no matter the season.

Btw, tempeh can be home-dried and reconstitutes perfectly in hot soups etc.  Tofu on the other hand tends to dry rock solid and can’t be eaten in any form—either as a snack or in soups.  You can home-dry baked/flavored tofu and stop before it gets rock hard and it becomes a chewy snack—soy jerky.

Plus, for those not allergic to peanuts—there’s the beautiful backpacking product called PEANUT BUTTER.  It can be added to hot oatmeal or used in pb and jam sandwiches or eaten by itself.  I only buy the natural kind without hydrogenated fat.

freeze dried tofu is a thing.  It’s been a traditional food in northern Japan for 800 years.  There they would put sliced tofu outside in the winter, it would freeze at night and dry out during the day.  A few cycles like that and you have freeze dried tofu.

Like regular tofu, it has very little flavor, but it will absorb flavors of whatever it’s cooked with.  The texture of freeze dried tofu is different from non-freeze dried.  It’s chewier, “meatier”, like white meat chicken (?).

You can buy it at some coop’s, natural foods stores, and macrobiotic suppliers.  It’s a bit pricey, but it’s not something I’d eat every day.  Maybe something to add to soup or stew once or twice a week.  Give it a google if you’re interested.

And good luck with the hike.  Sounds like the trip of a lifetime!