I am getting ready for a 2006 AT adventure with my husband. I am dehydrating meals that I cook as suggested by the Backpacker Gormet Cook Book. When sealing the packages with a vacuum sealer, some of the hard points on the food punch a hole in the plastic bag. I don’t want to eat all of my food as a pablum. Do you have this problem? If so, how did you remedy the problem without adding significant weight to the package? Thank you in advance.
Margaret
Margaret
Like you, I dehydrated and vacuum sealed a ton of food for my '05 thruhike w/ my hubby. Having read a lot of mostly older books, that was the advice I got. Well it turns out that in the past 5 or so years a lot more grocery stores have popped up on the trail. If I had it to do all over again, I would buy all my food along the trail for several reasons:
buying food was never a problem
it is impossible to predict what you will actually enjoy eating out there, and it sucks to be stuck with a ton of [fill in the blank] when it either doesn’t work in the field or you can’ stand it
it is more expensive to buy the dehydrator, the vacuum sealer, and then mail yourself the food. You will probably end up doing what we did: sending yourself several large maildrops and then breaking each of those up and bouncing them further up the trail. We spent a fortune at the post office
having to get to a post office for resupply SUCKS. Most often we got to town after 5 pm and wanted to leave before 8:30. And gawd forbid you get to town at 12:15 on a saturday - you’ll be stuck there till monday. A visit to the post office often meant an inconvenience to our schedule. If you do mail drops, at least send them to an outfitter or hostel.
That being said, I had the same problem as you vacuum sealing food. My two work-arounds: a) double sealing (a bag within a bag) or b) putting a paper towel between the sharp food and the bag. Good luck and have a great time out there!
camera1
Mmm, yeah, buy it on the trail you’ll get sick of what you made.
BUT, the things you do dry Marge either line the bag with a paper towel, which is also useful, or run the meal in your food processor for a bit to reduce the crumb size. You really won’t care about texture when you’re hungry, its all mush. Lasagna noodels are the worst. Just processs to pie size and its fine and don’t suck the bags to full vacumm. I also put the meal in a large bowl and stomp it with the butt end of my rolling pin.
If you’re doing some drops anyway, not to discourage you but both the Camera Crew, B+B and others for sure have dried and mailed food-tastes change.
It seems to work well just drying the essentials; fruit and jerky, veggies for soups like brocolli rehydrate great, carrots, bell peppers. Things that are light, things that are spicy and salty.
Bushwhack & Bramble
I made my own dehydrated food meals by going to waltonfeed.com and buying a whole bunch of stuff. Then put rice, some ingredients (TVP, vegies, spices, etc) and sealed them in ziplock bags. For breakfasts I had oatmeal with dehydrated fruits or applesauce (dehydrated). Otherwise I typically bought all my lunches. I made enough food for about 60% of our meals (breakfast and dinners) and then mail dropped a ton of snacks (candy bars, etc.). This way I saved time and money on most my meals and was able to buy food though for my current mood and not worry about eating all my mail drop stuff. I would mail drop every other week and buy every other week, but would bump box my extra stuff down the trail (USPS priority mail rocks!!), then I would just take what my wife and I (or other hikers) wanted from my boxes, and then continue on. This way with the TVP I got good balanced nutrition, and then fresh stuff along the way. I would probably do it the same way again, b/c we ate very well…
Michael Sanwald (FatCat)
Coincidentally, I’m getting ready for my hike next week and all the food I’ve dehydrated is coming out of the freezer and now being packed in ziplock bags. The jagged edges are a problem if it lets air in. So, we tried the food processor but it didn’t seem to work very well. Against my wife’s wishes, I demonstrated how much better a sludge hammer (gently of course) worked over the food processor. I made a believer out of her.
It’s definately more work dehydrating your own food. But I feel the benefits are worth it. To rehydrate, I just pour boiling water into my freezer bags, let it sit about 5 minutes and have a good home cooked vegetarian meal with my wife’s good cooking and have no dishes to clean afterward.
No more ramen for me.
hotfoot
I definitely agree that most of the food I sent myself I was sick of after the second mail drop, However, I never got tired of the dehydrated fruit (neither did anyone I was hiking around) and a couple I hiked with had a lot of dehydrated vegetables (brocolli, mushrooms etc) that they added. Everyone drooled over their meals. I’d suggest you dehydrate certain things that you can add to store bought stuff to improve the nutrition and the taste of your meals.
Grassy Ridge