You like to hike, or you would not be reading TrailGroove, America’s finest hiking magazine right now. And you probably like to eat good food, because you are a human. But for far too many people, hiking and eating well do not seem to go together. When I share a camp with fellow hikers, I often cringe to see the awful dreck they gag down: ramen, instant mashed potatoes, quinoa. If I ate that stuff day after day I would lose my will to hike, and perhaps my will to live. Many hikers, especially long-distance hikers, seem to accept bland tasteless minimally nutritious food as just another one of the challenges of hiking, like blisters, dirt, and bugs. They embrace not only brutality, but banality.

A collection of backpacking meals dehydrated and made at home

Better Food for the Trail

Of course there are alternatives to starchy glop. Freeze-dried dinners have gotten pretty good, but they still have their limitations. They are expensive, the available menu is limited – particularly if you don’t eat meat or grains – and it can be difficult to match portion sizes to group sizes and appetites.

Here is a fact: mass-produced food can never be as good as the food you prepare yourself. This is true at home and it is true on the trail. Partly this is a matter of taste. Tastes vary, but food manufacturers inevitably tune their recipes to appeal to the broadest market. They seek acceptance, not excellence, and can never do otherwise and hope to stay in business.

But the greater limitation on mass-produced food is ingredients. Any accomplished cook will tell you that good ingredients – not fancy appliances or clever recipes or even cooking skill – are the most critical factor in producing good food. If you have good ingredients, making good food is easy. A lot of recipes and advanced cooking techniques are just food hacks to compensate for poor quality ingredients.

This is where you have an advantage. We may not all be skilled chefs, but we can all acquire good ingredients. Nearly all of us have ready access to farmer’s markets or natural food stores. Even conventional grocery stores have stepped up their game in response to demand for quality meats, fruits, and vegetables. Better yet, growing your own vegetables takes surprisingly little land or effort. However you shop for (or grow) your food, you are bound to pick out the freshest, ripest specimens on the shelf, and your meals will reflect these choices. You will be starting out way ahead of mass meal producers.

OK, buying good food is one thing. Turning good food into good dehydrated meals is another. Isn’t that hard? Doesn’t it require expensive equipment? Isn’t it time-consuming?

I say that it is less hard and much less expensive than going ultralight and hiking 20 miles a day on a regular basis. In both cases it is mostly just a matter of realizing what’s possible, and then doing it.

I eased into making my trail food with beef jerky and dried fruits. The jerky I made from local grass-fed beef was so much better than store-bought that my daughters would routinely steal it all, and I had to start hiding it. The dried apples from my backyard trees were far more flavorful (and way less expensive) than the dried apples at the store.

Apples and jerky are snacks, not meals. When I was ready to take the next step, I found Chef Glenn’s backpackingchef website and book Recipes for Adventure to be invaluable resources: they explain every aspect of the process, from dehydrators to preparation to storage to recipes to cooking your meals.

Apples from the backyard

Making Dehydrated Backpacking Meals

Dehydrated meals are not quite as convenient as freeze-dried cook-in-bag meals. The usual method of cooking them is to add water, let them soak cold for five minutes, bring to a boil for 1-2 minutes, and let steep for ten minutes. If you are the kind of hiker who packs an extra-powerful stove because you want your coffee ready in three minutes rather than eight, this is probably too much time. I prefer not to be in a race to wolf down dinner, and can find plenty to do while waiting: collect firewood (rarely), sip whisky (much more often), or contemplate the meaning of life (which, to a naive observer, might look like staring slack-jawed into space).

Because dehydrating food is an excellent way of preserving it, I can pick and prepare fruits and vegetables at their peak season and enjoy them for months: peas in June, watermelon (that’s right, it is delicious dried) in July, corn in August, Palisade peaches in September, peppers and tomatoes and apples in October, eggs from my backyard chickens whenever they are laying.

Drying food is time-consuming, but most of that time is taken up by the dehydrating process. It doesn’t take much hands-on time to chop up a few vegetables and put them in the dryer. Other ingredients, like hamburger, tomato sauce leather, or potato bark require a bit more preparation, but not much. And unless you hate cooking – in which case I really can’t help you – this is time well-spent. You are providing tasty and nutritious meals for your future self, meals that will be enjoyed in beautiful wilderness settings. Food prep time is a good time to be dreaming about that next expedition.

My goal is to build up and then maintain a pantry full of ingredients to be combined into meals whenever I am ready to head out on the trail. A vacuum sealer is an invaluable tool for this purpose, particularly when you add a jar-sealing accessory. Sealable bags are expensive and not a great option for long-term storage. Canning jars can be picked up cheap at garage sales and used over and over. Dried food that is sealed in glass jars under vacuum will keep for many months and retain its flavor well.

Once you’ve built up a larder of a dozen or so ingredients, you have what you need to make a wide variety of meals as well as variations on basic themes. For instance, I’ll make scrambled eggs with ham, cheese and onions for one meal, then with chorizo, peppers and onions for another. You can also change the proportions of ingredients in the same dish – more spices, less meat, etc. – to add further variety. Right now I am putting together twenty dinners for a section hike of the Arizona Trail. I’ll have a dozen different dinners, and am repeating some only because they are favorites. And of course you can change the portion size as well. For the first ten days of a long hike I pack regular (4-5 oz dried) portions, and then raise that amount by half to compensate for the inevitable increase in appetite.

Dehydrated watermelon

What You Need

Not much, other than the willingness to try. You can dry food in the oven, or even out in the sun if you really don’t want to spend any money. But you can pick up a perfectly functional used Nesco dehydrator for $30 or less on the used market, or for $70 new at stores and here at Amazon.com. There are no moving parts other than the fan, so it should last you many years. Also buy some extra non-stick trays. I highly recommend getting a vacuum sealer so that you can pack and store food for the long term. Get one with an accessory port for the jar sealing attachment. Used on eBay for $40 or less, $80+ new at stores and here at Amazon.com.

Final Thoughts

Eating well is one of the great pleasures of life, along with good friends, good beer, and good trails. The more of these things you put together, the more you are winning. Don’t give up good food in order to go hiking. Make your own food, and make dinnertime a highlight of your trail experience, not just a soulless refueling stop.

Editor's Note: This article by Drew "HappyHour" Smith originally appeared in Issue 33 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here featuring additional photos and more.