Food is constantly on our minds while we are on outdoor adventures! Considering that we burn anywhere from 3,500 to 4,500 calories a day while thruhiking, that shouldn’t be surprising. Instead, it gives us lots of motivation during the offseason to plan ahead for our next trip by coming up with creative recipes. Over the last few weeks we have held a friendly competition to find out which one of us is capable of creating a better dehydrated recipe!
The Rules of the Competition:
- Each of us has to create an original backpacking dinner recipe.
- The recipe has to be something we can hopefully incorporate into our adventure menu… as long as it tastes good enough!
- No peeking: we don’t get to learn what the other person made until we’re ready to taste test and crown the winner.
Tim’s Recipe:
Our dinner recipes are usually built around on one of three different “bases”: pasta, rice, or ramen. Sticking to this general format makes dehydrating and rehydrating really simple, so I decided not to veer off of the path. Instead, I thought about what tastes we don’t get to eat while out on the trail. That’s when it hit me — I LOVE barbecue sauce, but we have never made a dehydrated recipe that uses it. I decided to make dehydrated barbecue black beans and rice. Check out the recipe here!
Renee’s Recipe:
I am a bit competitive, so I decided to go all out and try something a bit risky! Tim usually does the cooking at home and on the trail, so I was a bit nervous. Last time we visited my mom, she made us sloppy lentil sandwiches. They were surprisingly tasty. Thanks, mom! Normally we use rice or pasta as our carbohydrate on trail, but I decided it was time for something new. Is it possible to dehydrate a sandwich? I wasn’t sure, but the dehydrated bun ended up working just fine. And the lentils tasted great of coarse! Check out the recipe here.
Crowning the Winner:
We went for a hike in the forest and hills above our town and brought along one large portion of each recipe and our cooking gear. We were hoping for sunny weather, but mother nature didn’t cooperate. Instead we had 90% clouds, but at least it didn’t rain! We found a nice spot in the forest to lay out our Tyvek ground sheet and enjoy a little picnic. Both recipes were super simple to rehydrate and absorbed water very well. We weren’t sure if rehydrating the bun for Renee’s recipe would work, but it did! The texture of the bun mixed throughout the lentils was perfect — kind of like stuffing at Thanksgiving. Tim’s barbecue black beans and rice were absolutely loaded with barbecue sauce which gave them a beautifully sweet and smokey flavor. We were split on who to award the winner to because both recipes turned out so good — Tim thought Renee won and Renee thought Tim won. In the end, we decided that the added originality of Renee’s recipe tipped the scales in her favor. BUT, we will definitely be mailing both of these to ourselves along the trail during our upcoming 4-month outdoor adventure!!
Great job you two! I’m glad the sloppy Joe’s recipe was the winner though!! 😁
what kind of dehydrator do you use?
what kind of dehydrator do you use? and where can you get one/ the cost of one 🙂