One food that is really tasty, and a nice healthy treat is Freeze dried sweet corn kernels. Not only is this a great addition to the meals, but they are these tasty treats to eat, sort of a healthy corn nut style of crunch (except more fresh than crunchy). dehydrated just isn't the same for a standalone snack
Hey there Six, Have you all seen the "GearSkeptic" videos about backpacking food? I am looking forward to the video, but this youtuber is a big recommendation for me each and every time that I start to discuss trail food. My diet use to be much different, before I watched him. it's not that i suggest people have to eat what he suggests, BUT I do think that it raises some really neat viewpoints to think about while hiking. For me, the electrolytes was a really big difference.
I do like the fact that you are doing both, doing your own food and than also resulting in town and helping them out with rebuilding and supporting them also!
Absolutely! Being from western North Carolina, we’ve seen the direct need these small towns have with rebuilding. Definitely going to do our part to support these towns that depend on thru hikers!
Very true, much cheaper, more delicious making your own meals, and you can control what you’re eating. I’m planning on using Mylar bags so I can pour the hot water right into it, just like the store backpacking meals have.
Great idea using the Mylar bags! Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of other thru-hikers reheating food and eating out of freezer bags but this does not sound appealing to our family!
I've dehydrated a few individual items and one of my favorites is unsweetened applesauce and making my own "roll-ups"... after mentioning doing grapefruit/oranges to put in your water, I'm thinking of trying lemons/limes... looking forward to your hike! Happy Trails! 🥾🎒⛺️🌲🐻💜
Learning how to hydrate now. So far only blueberries and strawberries and I have mangos on my list of things to do today. Will graduate to "meals" next week. We have the exact same dehydrator. Praying for your sweet family. :)
Thank for the prayers and following along! This dehydrator has made things super easy and pretty foolproof to setup. We’ve been pleased with it and hope you are too!
So far we’ve done taco meat/beans fixings for tortillas, bison chili, spaghetti, and chicken veg soup. Am hoping to have at least one more meal in the rotation. The Hungry Hiker has a backcountry chicken pot pie recipe that I might try! Definitely time intensive….but hoping these meals will help break up the standard Dollar General resupply food! I do love seeing what I others have tried!
Here in Eur I can buy bags of pre-dried aubergine (egg plant), bell pepper, tomato. Mainly from Turkey. Quite salty, takes a while to rehydrate and cook. The aubergines have their soft interior cut out before drying, which leaves a quite substantial, not too mushy vegetable. In the bags that I bought online the individual pieces are strung om a string. Might be interesting for you too (if you still have the time to search and order).
One suggestion is to add more protein than you would for normal life meals. Long distance backpacking over works muscle tissue and can cause cell damage (one of the reasons that you’re sore the next day). Protein helps repair those cells plus provide energy to the cells. We dried ground beef, thin slices of chicken and steak. Dried TVP (vegetable protein) was inexpensive, available at our health food store, doesn’t weigh much and has no flavor so it was easy to add to anything. We also dried lots of veggies. I’d add a cup of protein and veggies to a qt. water bottle, fill with water and carry it for the day then added it to a noodle or rice dinner. Easy peasy and tasted great. Your system looks great! I died my food in a homemade food dryer or the stove. Boy, technology sure has advanced! Looking forward to following y’all’s hike. Stay warm!
That’s a great tip! Another part of our plan that I forgot to mention in the video is eating lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, proteins and carbs while we are in towns.
What a great idea . Im sure they will taste good. No matter how good they taste a big fat greasy cheeseburger and fries will look like a meal fit for a king. Im excited to see what your trail names are going to be.Peace Love and freeze dried meals
Thanks for the encouragement! It’s hard to believe it’s getting so close. A big cheeseburger and fries will be a welcome reward in town along with all the fresh fruit and veggies we can get our hands on!
Looks like you are putting dehydrated food in vacuum sealed bags. Is that this only way to store them until shipping to yourself? And If you do vaccuum seal is that all you have to do while the food is waiting to be shipped to you or should you also keep them in freezer until ready to ship?
Thank you for following along! While still pretty novice at dehydrating, we’ve learned quite a bit. We find that the combination of dehydrating and vacuum sealing increases the shelf life of the food. We end up storing the bags in a cool, dry location to further reduce the risk of spoiling. One of the prior comments posted by a viewer to this video suggested using Mylar bags in place of vacuum sealed bags. You can also store dehydrated food in storage containers like mason jars if you have a vacuum sealing attachment.
Great job preparing. I’ve always thought this would be the way to go. Prepackaged are so expensive & don’t taste that good. Plus, all the future landfill waste of the packaging. If you’d like s good fresh home cooked meal once in awhile most hostels will fit a small fee will let you shower & eat w/ no stay or stay in property in your own sleep system.
We really appreciate the encouragement and tip on cooking at hostels. We know it’s impossible to dehydrate enough food for all 6 of us to last the entire thru hike. We’ve enjoyed the process and using our dehydrator for things we all love!
Love this idea! But......how does it taste after your re-hydrate & cook it? We are thinking of getting a dehydrator (since watching your vid), for our trail snacks and maybe meals once we start overnighting.
Thanks for watching and following along! I wish I had a more technical answer for you as to how we found our dehydrator. While comparing different models we ultimately settled on this one based on size. It has the perfect number of trays to use without taking up too much counter space or being too small that we’d have to use it too many times to get a suitable dehydrated quantity for our family of six!
I make my own meals as well, and have had fun trying out various things. Many of my 'one pot' meals, I dehydrate all the individual items, then combine the items before bagging and sealing. I find this actually makes the meal reconstruct a bit better than if everything is put together first, then dehydrated. For instance, I make lasagna - dehydrate the sauce/diced peppers/chopped onions/spices/herbs all together, dehydrate the shredded moz cheese, dehydrate the ricotta cheese, dehydrate the cooked ground beef, dehydrate the cooked ground sweet Italian sausage, dehydrate the cooked lasagna noodles that have been cut into about 1" wide pieces. Then I combine everything into one-serving bags and seal them up. One caveat, since the meat is the one thing I am most worried about in regards to dehydrating for longer term shelf stable storage, I usually seal the meat up separately, then put that small bag containing the meat into the bag with all the other ingredients, before sealing that up. That way if I find the meat doesn't smell quite right, the rest of the meal is still fine and perfectly safe to eat. I've never had dehydrated meat go rancid, but I play it safe so I still have something to eat on trail if it does. I know it's a pain, but as I said, I found it rehydrates better, less of a mushed mess of stuff. 😆 I've also found that taking the time to cooked, then dehydrate any type of pasta works great - it's basically already cooked so rehydrating it doesn't require cooking to get it to al dente. So many different pasta/stew dishes can be made - one of my favorites is a Moroccan stew. I've never thought of the citrus for water bottles though - I'll have to try that out! I also make a lot of more custom size bags, since I just need food for one. It's easy to cut a large roll of vacuum seal bags into whatever size you want, sealing all but one side before putting in the food to vacuum seal. Those things aren't cheap, so I try to get every bit out of them that I can. Since I'm not long distance hiking, I bring home the used bags, and one that was used for the meal is still big enough for the meat for another use. Once the bag has been used for meat, what is left is usually big enough for a couple tablespoons of peanut butter, or Nutella. Even those can be washed and finally used for a few pills or vitamins. I always try to be as frugal as possible! LOL
@@sixpackhikers My favorite is a Moroccan stew recipe - I love lamb, but I'm sure it could be made with any other sort of ground meat. I would have to look at my recipe card at home, but it has tomatoes, garbanzo beans, lamb, rice, and a lot of different spices & herbs! I'm sure you could fine one that your family would like. I like making stews that don't have a lot of liquid, so I can eat it on a wrap. Another favorite is basically a bulked up taco - ground beef, taco seasoning, shredded cheddar cheese, sour cream, black beans, rice. Sour cream is a great thing to dehydrate - it reconstitutes fairly well although does take a while to get 'thick'. It's great to have in small packets to add to anything. For example, for the bulky tacos, again, all the ingredients are dehydrated separately. The meat cooked in the taco seasoning is packaged separately. I also package and rehydrate the sour cream separately. The beans, rice, and cheddar cheese are all packaged together, with the meat packet inside. I leave the sour cream packet out - I pack that on it's on, and more on that further down. I think overall, whatever you want to be sure you taste/enjoy of a one pot meal, dehydrate and package it individually - like the sour cream. I think it's already great that you have packaged tomatoes, and green onions on their own - they are great additions, and with a family, where some make like something and others may not, it's a good way to go. There are some things I'll start to cold soak mid-afternoon (like sour cream) so that it is perfect by dinner time. For just me, one of those silicon salad dressing single serve containers work well and easy enough to rinse fairly clean with a few splashes of water and a whole lot of shaking - a couple of times. For a family you would probably want a larger container to reconstitute something like sour cream. A zip lock bag would work, but I think it would be worth it to use a silicon reusable ziplock, that you have for whatever sauce or topping at any meal you would want to reconstitute for a family. A silicon zip lock is what I use to cold soak my dog's food mid-afternoon so it is nice and tender by dinner time and it means less water I have to boil at dinner - plus he can eat right away instead of waiting. I filled out your Google form a couple of weeks ago - feel free to email me with any more dehydrating questions!
I came across this in my feed after watching your video and it made me think of you guys. I am so excited for you and the kids. th-cam.com/video/e7n3qRvGB7s/w-d-xo.htmlsi=NVrQR9HvPUOfFiMP
Thank you for sharing that TEDtalk! I think every family that starts the trail together has the same goals. Abundant family time, hoping to come out the other end stronger, and teaching their kids invaluable life lessons. Can’t wait to start our journey and hoping we are blessed to be able to complete all of it. Thank you for the encouragement!❤
@@gollwoods3854 we will just have to agree to disagree. Feel free to follow along to see if you’re right, though we do aim to prove you wrong. Thanks for watching! ☺️🥾
One food that is really tasty, and a nice healthy treat is Freeze dried sweet corn kernels. Not only is this a great addition to the meals, but they are these tasty treats to eat, sort of a healthy corn nut style of crunch (except more fresh than crunchy). dehydrated just isn't the same for a standalone snack
Thank you for the suggestion! Where have you had success finding freeze dried corn? Any particular brand that you prefer?
@@sixpackhikers Mother earth products, but i assume that i could find it cheaper elsewhere.
Great video!
May I suggest looking into adding bone broth for more protein and calories? I recently found Bare Bones and love them!
What a great tip! Thank you for the suggestion. Do you have a favorite trail meal to add it to?
Hey there Six,
Have you all seen the "GearSkeptic" videos about backpacking food?
I am looking forward to the video, but this youtuber is a big recommendation for me each and every time that I start to discuss trail food.
My diet use to be much different, before I watched him.
it's not that i suggest people have to eat what he suggests, BUT I do think that it raises some really neat viewpoints to think about while hiking. For me, the electrolytes was a really big difference.
Thanks for the recommendation on "GearSkeptic." We haven't heard of the channel but will be sure to check it out! 🥾🥾
In my opinion prep'n those freeze dried packs is well worth the time and effort. Love the citrus to drop in your water bottle idea.
Thanks for the kind words and joining along on this journey!
Good idea with such a big group.
Thank you! It was a great blessing when we used our own dehydrated items on the Foothills Trail last year!
I do like the fact that you are doing both, doing your own food and than also resulting in town and helping them out with rebuilding and supporting them also!
Absolutely! Being from western North Carolina, we’ve seen the direct need these small towns have with rebuilding. Definitely going to do our part to support these towns that depend on thru hikers!
@@sixpackhikers exactly! But also understand the need to do your own food also! Love both!! ❤️💕❤️💕
Very impressive. Great prior planning.
Thank you!
Great idea for a LD hike! Thanks for posting.
Thanks for following along!
Very true, much cheaper, more delicious making your own meals, and you can control what you’re eating. I’m planning on using Mylar bags so I can pour the hot water right into it, just like the store backpacking meals have.
Great!
Great idea using the Mylar bags! Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of other thru-hikers reheating food and eating out of freezer bags but this does not sound appealing to our family!
@@SparkyOne549 that is an awesome idea!!!! :)
I've dehydrated a few individual items and one of my favorites is unsweetened applesauce and making my own "roll-ups"... after mentioning doing grapefruit/oranges to put in your water, I'm thinking of trying lemons/limes... looking forward to your hike! Happy Trails! 🥾🎒⛺️🌲🐻💜
We might have to copy your applesauce roll up! Thanks for the tip. The kids’ personal favorite is dried mango but a roll up might convert them! 😊
Learning how to hydrate now. So far only blueberries and strawberries and I have mangos on my list of things to do today. Will graduate to "meals" next week. We have the exact same dehydrator. Praying for your sweet family. :)
Thank for the prayers and following along! This dehydrator has made things super easy and pretty foolproof to setup. We’ve been pleased with it and hope you are too!
Nice video!
@@lt2246 thank you!
Thanks so much! We are also trying put dehydrating for our LASH starting in May! Happy Trails!
Thanks for following along! Anything you’ve specifically enjoyed while testing out your own dehydrator?
So far we’ve done taco meat/beans fixings for tortillas, bison chili, spaghetti, and chicken veg soup. Am hoping to have at least one more meal in the rotation. The Hungry Hiker has a backcountry chicken pot pie recipe that I might try! Definitely time intensive….but hoping these meals will help break up the standard Dollar General resupply food! I do love seeing what I others have tried!
Here in Eur I can buy bags of pre-dried aubergine (egg plant), bell pepper, tomato. Mainly from Turkey. Quite salty, takes a while to rehydrate and cook. The aubergines have their soft interior cut out before drying, which leaves a quite substantial, not too mushy vegetable. In the bags that I bought online the individual pieces are strung om a string. Might be interesting for you too (if you still have the time to search and order).
Thanks for the tip!
This is great information. Thank you!
Happy to share what we’ve learned! Still novices at it and trying to get better every time we use it. Thanks for following along!
One suggestion is to add more protein than you would for normal life meals. Long distance backpacking over works muscle tissue and can cause cell damage (one of the reasons that you’re sore the next day). Protein helps repair those cells plus provide energy to the cells. We dried ground beef, thin slices of chicken and steak. Dried TVP (vegetable protein) was inexpensive, available at our health food store, doesn’t weigh much and has no flavor so it was easy to add to anything. We also dried lots of veggies. I’d add a cup of protein and veggies to a qt. water bottle, fill with water and carry it for the day then added it to a noodle or rice dinner. Easy peasy and tasted great.
Your system looks great! I died my food in a homemade food dryer or the stove. Boy, technology sure has advanced!
Looking forward to following y’all’s hike. Stay warm!
That’s a great tip! Another part of our plan that I forgot to mention in the video is eating lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, proteins and carbs while we are in towns.
I'm excited to follow your families adventure 👣
Thanks so much for joining our digital trail family! We are stoked to get started ❤️🥾
Great way to make meals that everyone likes. Looking forward to following.
Thank you for joining along during our adventure!
What a great idea . Im sure they will taste good. No matter how good they taste a big fat greasy cheeseburger and fries will look like a meal fit for a king. Im excited to see what your trail names are going to be.Peace Love and freeze dried meals
Thanks for the encouragement! It’s hard to believe it’s getting so close. A big cheeseburger and fries will be a welcome reward in town along with all the fresh fruit and veggies we can get our hands on!
Looks like you are putting dehydrated food in vacuum sealed bags. Is that this only way to store them until shipping to yourself? And If you do vaccuum seal is that all you have to do while the food is waiting to be shipped to you or should you also keep them in freezer until ready to ship?
Thank you for following along! While still pretty novice at dehydrating, we’ve learned quite a bit. We find that the combination of dehydrating and vacuum sealing increases the shelf life of the food. We end up storing the bags in a cool, dry location to further reduce the risk of spoiling. One of the prior comments posted by a viewer to this video suggested using Mylar bags in place of vacuum sealed bags.
You can also store dehydrated food in storage containers like mason jars if you have a vacuum sealing attachment.
Great job preparing. I’ve always thought this would be the way to go. Prepackaged are so expensive & don’t taste that good. Plus, all the future landfill waste of the packaging.
If you’d like s good fresh home cooked meal once in awhile most hostels will fit a small fee will let you shower & eat w/ no stay or stay in property in your own sleep system.
We really appreciate the encouragement and tip on cooking at hostels. We know it’s impossible to dehydrate enough food for all 6 of us to last the entire thru hike. We’ve enjoyed the process and using our dehydrator for things we all love!
Love this idea! But......how does it taste after your re-hydrate & cook it?
We are thinking of getting a dehydrator (since watching your vid), for our trail snacks and maybe meals once we start overnighting.
It’s not exactly like the original, but pretty close! When we’re on trail and famished, we are far less picky thankfully 😅🥾
How did you choose your dehydrator? I like the size of yours
Thanks for watching and following along! I wish I had a more technical answer for you as to how we found our dehydrator. While comparing different models we ultimately settled on this one based on size. It has the perfect number of trays to use without taking up too much counter space or being too small that we’d have to use it too many times to get a suitable dehydrated quantity for our family of six!
@@sixpackhikers Looking forward to following along on your AT Journey
I make my own meals as well, and have had fun trying out various things. Many of my 'one pot' meals, I dehydrate all the individual items, then combine the items before bagging and sealing. I find this actually makes the meal reconstruct a bit better than if everything is put together first, then dehydrated. For instance, I make lasagna - dehydrate the sauce/diced peppers/chopped onions/spices/herbs all together, dehydrate the shredded moz cheese, dehydrate the ricotta cheese, dehydrate the cooked ground beef, dehydrate the cooked ground sweet Italian sausage, dehydrate the cooked lasagna noodles that have been cut into about 1" wide pieces. Then I combine everything into one-serving bags and seal them up. One caveat, since the meat is the one thing I am most worried about in regards to dehydrating for longer term shelf stable storage, I usually seal the meat up separately, then put that small bag containing the meat into the bag with all the other ingredients, before sealing that up. That way if I find the meat doesn't smell quite right, the rest of the meal is still fine and perfectly safe to eat. I've never had dehydrated meat go rancid, but I play it safe so I still have something to eat on trail if it does. I know it's a pain, but as I said, I found it rehydrates better, less of a mushed mess of stuff. 😆 I've also found that taking the time to cooked, then dehydrate any type of pasta works great - it's basically already cooked so rehydrating it doesn't require cooking to get it to al dente. So many different pasta/stew dishes can be made - one of my favorites is a Moroccan stew. I've never thought of the citrus for water bottles though - I'll have to try that out! I also make a lot of more custom size bags, since I just need food for one. It's easy to cut a large roll of vacuum seal bags into whatever size you want, sealing all but one side before putting in the food to vacuum seal. Those things aren't cheap, so I try to get every bit out of them that I can. Since I'm not long distance hiking, I bring home the used bags, and one that was used for the meal is still big enough for the meat for another use. Once the bag has been used for meat, what is left is usually big enough for a couple tablespoons of peanut butter, or Nutella. Even those can be washed and finally used for a few pills or vitamins. I always try to be as frugal as possible! LOL
All great tips! The lasagna sounds like it’d be delicious on trail! Any other one pot meals you’ve found particularly tasty dehydrating on your own?
@@sixpackhikers My favorite is a Moroccan stew recipe - I love lamb, but I'm sure it could be made with any other sort of ground meat. I would have to look at my recipe card at home, but it has tomatoes, garbanzo beans, lamb, rice, and a lot of different spices & herbs! I'm sure you could fine one that your family would like. I like making stews that don't have a lot of liquid, so I can eat it on a wrap. Another favorite is basically a bulked up taco - ground beef, taco seasoning, shredded cheddar cheese, sour cream, black beans, rice. Sour cream is a great thing to dehydrate - it reconstitutes fairly well although does take a while to get 'thick'. It's great to have in small packets to add to anything. For example, for the bulky tacos, again, all the ingredients are dehydrated separately. The meat cooked in the taco seasoning is packaged separately. I also package and rehydrate the sour cream separately. The beans, rice, and cheddar cheese are all packaged together, with the meat packet inside. I leave the sour cream packet out - I pack that on it's on, and more on that further down. I think overall, whatever you want to be sure you taste/enjoy of a one pot meal, dehydrate and package it individually - like the sour cream. I think it's already great that you have packaged tomatoes, and green onions on their own - they are great additions, and with a family, where some make like something and others may not, it's a good way to go. There are some things I'll start to cold soak mid-afternoon (like sour cream) so that it is perfect by dinner time. For just me, one of those silicon salad dressing single serve containers work well and easy enough to rinse fairly clean with a few splashes of water and a whole lot of shaking - a couple of times. For a family you would probably want a larger container to reconstitute something like sour cream. A zip lock bag would work, but I think it would be worth it to use a silicon reusable ziplock, that you have for whatever sauce or topping at any meal you would want to reconstitute for a family. A silicon zip lock is what I use to cold soak my dog's food mid-afternoon so it is nice and tender by dinner time and it means less water I have to boil at dinner - plus he can eat right away instead of waiting. I filled out your Google form a couple of weeks ago - feel free to email me with any more dehydrating questions!
I came across this in my feed after watching your video and it made me think of you guys. I am so excited for you and the kids.
th-cam.com/video/e7n3qRvGB7s/w-d-xo.htmlsi=NVrQR9HvPUOfFiMP
Thank you for sharing that TEDtalk! I think every family that starts the trail together has the same goals. Abundant family time, hoping to come out the other end stronger, and teaching their kids invaluable life lessons. Can’t wait to start our journey and hoping we are blessed to be able to complete all of it. Thank you for the encouragement!❤
@@sixpackhikers The kids might teach you some things as well..
@@keithmeyers1720 true story!
I wish you all well but you are delusional. It is ridiculous to take 4 kids on the trail. Just stop living in a fantasy
@@gollwoods3854 we will just have to agree to disagree. Feel free to follow along to see if you’re right, though we do aim to prove you wrong. Thanks for watching! ☺️🥾