Camp Cooking Class at REI: Tips for Eating Well on the Trail

As you can see on the Events Calendar, REI offers many free classes on various outdoor topics. I’ve attended free talks on staying safe in the backcountry, using a map and compass, and maximizing your outdoor photography. Last week, I went to one on camp cooking.

All of the REI locations offered a version of this talk (which featured a component about bear safety with regard to taking food into the woods), but I was especially fortunate to attend one of two that featured guest speaker Sarah Kirkconnell of TrailCooking.com and the cookbook Freezer Bag Cooking and Cat of VerdantEats.

Sarah and her family spend a lot of time in the outdoors, and she developed the idea of and recipes (around 3000!) for Freezer Bag Cooking. This is a method of creating your own very light meals to take on the trail. Sarah wanted to address some of the shortcomings she experienced with commercially prepared trail food, primarily cost, taste and variety.

The recipes she’s developed mainly consist of dried ingredients combined in a zip-top freezer bag. You pour water just off the boil into the bag, let it reconstitute, and eat from the bag. As the book puts it “cleanup is as easy as licking your utensils and sealing the zip-top bag.”

The cost savings from this method are pretty apparent. Many of the ingredients are going to be the kinds of dry goods you can get in a grocery’s bulk section, which is generally very economical. She showed us a Garden Vegetable Couscous mix that they hacked from a commercial version. The commercial version cost $7.90 and theirs cost $3. Their vegetables also looked fresher and plumper.

We weren’t able to actually cook anything as the presentation had been moved inside due to weather, so I can’t vouch for flavor, but it just seems to be common sense that if you can control the ingredients and tailor it to your tastes, it’s going to be more satisfying. Ditto for variety; since you’re not locked into what’s available already packaged, you can make your own variations.

So by the end of the talk, I was really excited about the possibilities. I must admit I’m not yet a long-distance hiker or backpacker, but part of why I started this site is that I want to start getting out more. I realized in watching this lecture that there was a lot I’d never even considered with regard to food fueling longer trips, so it was great and helpful information.  

I’m going to put some more tips at the bottom of this post, but first, here are a few features on the TrailCooking site to check out:

• The recipes section (in left sidebar) includes a widget that allows you to scale the recipe.
• I also noticed that some of the recipes include links to online sources for some of the less common ingredients. (There is also a list of ingredient sources on the site.)
• There’s a Dehydrating 101 section with a dehydrator recommendations.
• There is a section on the Fauxbaker, for making chocolate cake, muffins, biscuits and other baked goods on the trail without requiring a lot of heavy stuff.

Here were some of the helpful tips for me from the talk:

• Vegetables and fruits are generally better freeze-dried rather than heat-dried, while the opposite it true for meats.
• Sarah didn’t seem to be a fan of dried meat in general, so recommended that for protein, you consider bringing shelf-stable meats and fish (like foil packets of tuna or chicken).
• Since many of the freezer bag recipes are going to be heavy on the starches and vegetables (ergo mainly free of fat), she recommends bringing these foil packets of olive oil or vegetable oil to help give you the fat and calories you’ll need on long hikes. She said these are generally pretty sturdy and she’s never had one burst.
• Pastas, rices, quinoa, beans and lentils should all be fully cooked, then dried in order to cut cooking time and fuel usage significantly.
• Bear canisters are now required in the Olympics, but you can borrow them at some ranger stations or the Wilderness Information Center for a suggested donation of $3.
• Although cheese will get oily and soft on the trail, it will likely not actually go bad if you keep it clean and avoid handling it with bare hands too much. (She recommends portioning it out rather than leaving it in one block for everyone to touch.)
• She only uses name brand, US-made freezer bags in order to ensure they can withstand the heat of the hot water. If you are concerned about using plastics, you could try wax paper or muslin bags, but then keep in mind you will need to cook the meal in pot rather than the bag.
• Wrapping your bag or cooking vessel in insulation in cold weather ensure that your food gets thoroughly cooked rather than losing heat to the elements before everything is rehydrated.  (On Sarah's website, she offers little fabric envelopes as cozies for the freezer bag.) 

Comments

[Cat]

Thanks so much for your article! I'm glad you enjoyed the presentation and we were thrilled to be able to share what we've learned over the years with another room-full of hungry hikers. :)