Dehydrating

To the amusement of our friends, T and I are the very proud owners of a food dehydrator! We bought it in 2011 after trying to work out how to live healthily and cheaply when hiking. I was concerned that some shop bought dehydrated foods were high in salt, not very filling and really expensive so we thought lets make our own! Since then all our camping food has been home made and its delicious - even if I do say so myself!

We bought the machine from Juiceland, finally deciding on the excitingly named Excaliber! When it arrived I must admit I was slightly disappointed. It is basically a black box with a few shelves and a very low power heater with a timer. But that's all we need because dehydrating is really just drying food slowly, you could do it in the oven if the temperature was low enough (around 50-60 degrees C).

Our dehydrated food!

So, how do we do it? Its simply a case of making up a batch of something yummy like chili, making sure to minimise the amount of liquid added (strain off any excess when its ready), split into portion sizes and then spread thinly on a dehydrating tray. For foods which are a bit sloppy we use the Paraflexx sheets on top of the trays. Then set the thermostat at 50 degrees ish and leave for around 12 hours, checking every so often and rotating the trays. When the food is totally dry we store it in double layer plastic food bags. They can then last for a couple of months or about 6 months in the fridge or about a year in the freezer.

We don't make up any fancy recipes, just normal stuff we'd eat everyday - chili, curry, bolognaise. Mince is a pretty good basis for a dehydrated meal and chicken works well. We add lots of beans and lentils for extra calories - but choose smaller beans, they re-hydrate better. And to make the dehydrating quicker, chop everything super-fine. This book, Backpack Gourmet,  is pretty good  - we've adapted a couple of soup recipes from it and it gave us the idea for amazing fruit leather - see below - but mostly we just cook up a normal dish and dehydrate it! Even though pasta and rice doesn't take long to cook, it takes long enough and our aim was for the quickest possible meals using the least amount of fuel. So we cook and dehydrate pasta and rice too. For some meals we have noodle or couscous accompaniments, neither of these need dehydrating. For soups we sometimes at a bit of Smash to the packets to bulk them up a bit.

In the field all we do is add water (enough to cover the food), leave for a while and heat to boiling. In theory, meals could be eaten with cold water in an emergency - we did this once when I forgot the gas in the Lairig Ghru... I wouldn't say it was the best meal I've ever had but it worked!

Probably the coolest dehydrated produce are our fruit leathers - strawberry and apple. For strawberry leather I mush down a load of strawberries, add a little sugar and some cornflour and then spread thinly to dehydrate. For apple leather I stew the apples with some sugar and then dehydrate. It produces an amazingly concentrated flavour. Our fruit leather breaks are one of the most anticipated part of the day!

And while we're on about food - for breakfasts we use 'Oat so Simple' - just need to add hot water and comes in some great flavors.

 We loved the dehydrating lifestyle so much we told the in laws and they bought one - we're a two dehydrator family!!! I'm slightly embarrassed to say that out loud...

Two weeks worth of food - breakfasts, lunches,
dinners and snacks