The Problem With Some Freezer Bag Meals

“This is why you should carry only one or two of the meals that call for retort pouch ingredients.”

Well, I’d change that to : This is why I carry only one or two of the meals that call for retort pouch ingredients.

Being a slightly-younger-than-you old codger, I pretty immediately chafe at someone else telling me what I should do based on their backpacking style. A minor nitpick, to be sure.

Dehydrated chicken..

I have an Excalibur dehydrator and have done the dehydrated chicken.  I’ve never been happy with the consistency when re-hydrated.  More often than not, even after 5-8 minutes, the chicken portion of the meal is still crunchy.  The chicken I dehydrated was the canned pre-cooked chicken one usually finds in the supermarket next to the tuna and spam.

I’ve since given up and gone to freeze dried chicken, where the results have been so much better and consistent.  I’m still playing around with ground beef, particularly in my own dehydrated spaghetti with meat sauce.  I add the ground beef as part of making the sauce.   In my latest batch, I made the ground beef super fine by giving the cooked ground beef a quick spin in a small food processor before adding it to the sauce and dehydrating.  I will know next week whether this yields better results or not.

I’ve read some suggestions to add bread crumbs to ground beef to improve the FBC results, but I don’t quite understand when/where the bread crumbs get added.

I’ve had the same (lack of) luck dehydrating chicken…with the same results, and also gone to buying FD chicken…it always works. I’ve not had any problem dehydrating anything else including meats.  Dunno what it is about chicken, but there must be some as yet unrevealed-to-me trick to it.

Hmmm. Mine has not been bad. I buy cans from costco.. shred it with fork really well, save the juice with it from the can.. and dehydrate it all together.

If I’m making a meal with hamburger I’ll go ahead and dehydrate it with the rest of the ingredients. Other than that, I prefer the texture of freeze-dried meats compared to dehydrated.

Let us know the results of your hamburger experiment, Jeff.

Carrying food thats good to eat is never a “problem”

Carrying food you cant stand to eat…..is.

I’ve read some suggestions to add bread crumbs to ground beef to improve the FBC results, but I don’t quite understand when/where the bread crumbs get added.

Thoroughly work the breadcrumbs, about 1/2 cup per lb. of meat, into the raw ground beef.  Then brown the meat/crumb mixture and proceed with your recipe.  Yes it does help with rehydration, and may help with flavor retention.

Thanks for the tip, Mina!