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2 Dehydrating Food In this section, you will learn all the skills needed to dry the foods that will go into your meals, snacks and desserts. Buying a Food Dehydrator How to dry: Meats Vegetables Beans Potatoes Fruit Fruit Leather Tomato Sauce Rice Bread & Cake Bark When you pack up your dehydrated food supply for a backpacking trip, you will immediately notice that you evaporated pounds off your load. All rights reserved.

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4 Introduction to Bark Make bark by cooking starchy vegetables and blending them with additional flavors. Make bark with: Potatoes Sweet Potatoes Corn Beans Peas Pumpkin Corn and potatoes may be blended together to make chowder bark. Additional vegetables such as cauliflower, carrots and turnips may be blended in as well. Bark is a great carrier of flavor opening up many possibilities for saucy, delicious meals. Bark has many uses in the backpacker s menu: Snack on it like a chip Make mashed potatoes and meals with thick sauces Use to thicken and add flavor to soups Create barbeque and enchilada flavored sauces Include sweet potato bark in breakfast recipes Make pudding and pie Bark is fun to make. Most ingredients are cooked first and then run through the blender with additional seasonings and flavored liquids like broth. The food comes out of the blender in a smoothie-like consistency and is spread thinly on the dehydrator trays. It helps to flip the bark over when it is about ¾ of the way dry. Once dry, it can be broken into chips and packed as snacks or in meals. All rights reserved.

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6 Assembled Meals Now that you know how to dehydrate food and have seen several recipes made with bark, the recipes that follow will add to your dining possibilities by showing how to assemble dried ingredients into meals. Most of the recipes follow a formula of two parts starch (rice, macaroni or noodles) with one part meat or beans and one part vegetables. Change the proportions to meet your preferences. Every recipe may be altered to provide different meal options: Substitute different proteins in the recipes such as ground beef, chicken, ham or beans. Leave out the meat and double up on the vegetables or the other way around. Substitute gluten-free rice pasta for regular macaroni. (Annie s Homegrown makes a product) Use tomato sauce leather or one of the barks instead of powdered milk and cheese if you are avoiding milk products. Go light on the salt in the recipes and then add more after the meal is cooked if desired. It s wise to carry a little salt when backpacking since you lose a lot of sodium through sweating. The ratio of water to food in the recipes will generally fall in the range of 1:1 part water to food up to 1¼:1 part water to food. If a meal turns out a little dry, stir in a few more spoonfuls of water. If it turns out saucier than you want it, give it another five minutes for the food to soak up more of the liquid. All rights reserved.

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8 Breakfast Recipes Many backpackers carry instant grits and oatmeal for breakfast, but these products contain mostly artificial ingredients, sugar and salt. Even the fruits are not real! The oatmeal and grits recipes that follow improve the nutritional content with the addition of dried fruit, vegetables, and meat. Cereal, like granola, makes a fast breakfast when combined with dried fruit and powdered milk. Mix up the milk and then soak the fruit in it for a few minutes to soften it up. You could even warm it up a bit. Add the cereal to the fruit and milk. Making eggs on the trail has always been problematic. Powdered eggs often turn out terrible and are messy to cook. Dehydrated scrambled eggs by themselves don t rehydrate well. Determined to enjoy scrambled eggs on the trail, Chef Glenn created scrambled eggs that rehydrate well by combining eggs with cooked polenta (yellow grits). The mixture is baked and then dehydrated. Additional meats, vegetables and cheese are added on the trail. The scrambled egg recipes are cooked like all the other recipes in Recipes for Adventure without the need to carry a spatula or do any frying. Consider also these recipes already covered for breakfast: Rice Pudding, page 68 Sweet Potato Bark Porridge, page 94 And don t forget There s no rule that says you can t cook a dinner recipe for breakfast or scrambled eggs with ham and cheese for dinner. All rights reserved.

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10 Dessert Recipes The following pages show how to create delicious desserts by rehydrating and warming dried fruits with angel food cake, chocolate sauce and instant pudding. In addition to the recipes that follow, don t forget the preceding pages which offer many sweet and healthy options for desserts: Dehydrating Fruit & Making Fruit Cocktail, pg. 42 Fruit & Apple Sauce Leather, pg. 52 Rice Pudding, pg. 68 Dehydrating Bread & Cake, pg. 70 Fruit Root Bark & Pudding, pg. 92 Sweet Potato Bark Porridge, pg 94 Pumpkin Pie Bark, pg. 132 Granny Smith s Pumpkin Apple Pie Bark, pg All rights reserved.