Anyone make their own dehydrated meals? Recipes to share? Tricks?
With fruits that brown quickly when exposed to air, I use a diluted lemon juice bath and dip them in that first, like the bananas or apples.
I like some stews/soups when it is cold camping, so a trick with the potatoes is to blanch them first so they dont blacken/gray. I also use pontiacs because I like creamier potatoes. Cut them however you want to use them before blanching and dehydrating.
Same with any other components for your dehydrated meals, prepare them in the form you will use, try to make them as uniform in size as possible (drying). Some vegetables I will grate them. Smaller helps with the rehydration and cooking time, so you might want to think about how hungry you will be and how much time you want to expend before you eat kind of thing.
One of the tricks with meats is the fats and oils. Exposed to air, fats and oils will go rancid. So for general jerky I always go lean. But for camping meals I want the fats, partly for energy source and taste. Since I typically brown in oils/fats/butters my stew meats before stewing, any dehydrated meats that are prepared with fats/oils I will then freeze in baggies to prevent them going rancid. One of the ways older cultures dealt with preserving the meat fats with pemmican (pemmican is originally a Cree word for rendered fat) - high energy food, was with antioxidant fruits like chokecherries to prevent the oxidation of the fats. I dont like chokecherries in my stew though.
When you dehydrate a meal, lets say I have made cajun beans and rice with sausage, it is best to separate out the different components on the trays. So the rice are on a separate tray, the beans on one and the sausage on another, because they have different densities and dry at different at different times, the red beans and sausage will take longer than your rice. Then once everything is dry, you can mix them back together in a package for storage. Or on your sausage, just take dried stick sausage with you, cut it up and add it to the rest while cooking. The sausage flavor is not as permeated into the rice but I find people are so hungry at campouts that they are not going to quibble over flavor saturation as much as the foodie cook would.
Another thing to consider is how long you plan on being out and getting the biggest nutrient/energy bang for you weight/space. If you are out 1 or 2 days, you are probably not going to die in a short time out unless there is a seriously bad storm that hits, but if you are out longer, you might want to make sure that what you are packing is higher in certain things that your body is requiring. Like dehydrated bananas or plantain chips for potassium. Quinoa as your grain which is very high in protein. Ancient Roman soldiers made a campaign snack they kept in their bags for long marches of sesame seeds (high in calcium and protein), honey and flour. I make mine, focusing on sugars and electrolyte minerals with mashed dates (calcium, phosphorus), sesame seeds, almond flour (high magnesium), Himalayan salt (variety of minerals with sodium) and cocoa powder (potassium, magnesium).
Very true...learn that last year after a few days. I was prepared on our second trip. We're set of no less than two 10 day trips this summer into the newly designated wilderness along the Rocky Mtn Front.
