Trail Food: Drying and Cooking Food for Backpacking and Paddling

I have several books on dehydrating your own trail meals and this is easily the best. It is concise and full of good ideas and recipes. The guidance is flexible enough for the lightweight backpacker or for the canoe or pack mule traveler. For example, some of the recipes call for a dutch oven (too bulky and heavy for the lightweight backpacker) and others are suitable for a one pot meal (ideal for the lightweight backpacker).A nice feature is the chart of drying temperatures and times for different foods. Also, the chart of calorie and protein content of different foods is important to making sure you get enough calories to keep going in the field and enough protein to keep your body from consuming your muscle tissue for fuel. There are also plans for building your own dehydrator for the do-it-yourselfer. The suggested one week meal plan is a good guide to get you started on packing for a trip.The emphasis of this book is on drying individual ingredients and then rehydrating and combining them at meal time. This allows you to be more flexible in your meals, but takes a little longer at meal time. However, it also tells you how to use your own recipes to prepare a conmplete meal and then dehydrate it. Precooked spaghetti, rice or beans rehydrate and cook faster in the field. The book recommends having both types of meals with you for variety and flexibility. You can also dehydrate canned foods like vegetables or canned chicken, tuna or salmon and use them in your recipes.This book is concise and a fast read, but packs a lot of information. This means that you need to pay attention to pick up all the important points. Fully half of the book gives infomration on dehydrating and meal planning as well as other important instructions and the other half gives some excellent recipes.One important point (based on experience) is to be sure to try the recipes at home on the same stove and cooking utensels that you will have in the field. You want to make sure that you have everything you need and know how to use it BEFORE you are in the field and cold and wet and tired and hungry. That's not a good time to find out that you need another pot or that your pot isn't large enough to properly prepare your recipes!"Trail Food" is all you need to dehydrate your own meals, but a few other general books on dehydrating wouldn't hurt to help you gain a full understanding of all the nuances of dehydrating.Excellent book!

I have done very little backpacking and moderate camping, and I waited with baited breath for this book to arrive (fortunately delivery was very fast so I had little time to form my expectations). When it did arrive, I read the book in a matter of a couple hours. Granted, I did not read through every recipe. This book does have some good common sense information about food drying, but not much more than typical instructions of most driers supply. From there the book goes through the other issues of packing, carrying and preparing trail foods in the very briefest of manners. There are many recipes included, and I will invariably use a few of them, but this is not the information I sought as I know how to cook. The book was weak on many issues that I hoped it might contain, such as information on nontraditional means of food production, such as solar cooking. The short piece on choices between stoves and fires, and the choices in stoves was near useless, even for an beginner, but it did help to fluff out this very tiny 88 page book to a bit more reasonable expectations of what defines a book. There are many line drawings that also stand in place of the diction I expected, and the majority of them have little to do with support of the text. My biggest disappointment is the complete lack of mention of plant based foods gathered along the way. I know there are many books on this topic, but I was more than a little surprised to find a total lack herein. I guess I was looking for a useful trail book, and this is certainly not it. The space in my pack is too valuable.If you are looking for a recipe book with other basic tips, this book will serve you very well. Strangely, what I enjoyed most are the bits of prose at the chapter heads, but of course these had nothing to do with the book's subject. If you removed these from the book, and the useless line drawings, you would have enough left over for a lengthy magazine article, not a book. I am glad to have read this book, and I will refer to the recipes from time to time, but unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket, I would look for a used copy or go with another book altogether. Like most of you, I picked this book because of its high review ratings, and this time the ratings let me down.

I purchased this and lipsmackin backpackin at the same time and found this one to be the best. You can control the food you put in your body, you can use up garden extras, and the ideas for cross-use of items are excellent. Also small enough to pack along if you're not a lightweight hiker. I would highly recommend this as he's realistic about what you might want to purchase or not purchase to make the process easier - all budgets can afford his methods and he doesn't load you down with sodium. You can see my review of lipsmackin backpackin over there and find that sodium is a huge concern for me. It may not be a concern for you but even without that this book doesn't rely upon many store bought sauce packets or seasoning packets so you can choose what you like and enjoy your wilderness cooking that much more!In other words, if you have a husband as I do with high blood pressure this book will give you options that others don't. :)

If you are looking for ideas for an outdoor menu while on the trail this book has many great ideas and recipes. If you are interested in long term food storage this book is also a great resource. I have been an avid outdoors sportsman for many years and thought I had my outdoor cooking a food prep for long trips with minimum space and weight down to a science but I gained many new ideas from this book and can now have a wider variety of meals while away from home without adding much bulk to my pack or kayak. I have even used some of my new knowledge to add variety and nutrition to my kids' school lunches. From overnight campers to multi day trippers and those looking to be more self sufficient this book makes a great reference to add to your library.

Information and recipes are solid. The recipes are somewhat standard, but easily lead to making your own variations or sparking new ideas. I wish these types of books would provide the approximate serving amounts and advice on scaling the recipes for more or less people (as I tend to do more back country solo travelling).

this is a good book that gives a lot of good advice for people starting out in the désydratation meals for camping, but the vast majority of these recipes are in my opinion far more suitable for camping of pleasure on a baking fire, since it takes about 30 minutes cooking what can be enormous if you cook on a small stove or after a long day of hiking.

I got this book in prep for some kayak camping this book has many great ideas that I'm adapting from extreme backpackers and hikers. it's a good book with lots of great ideas on how to prep and store foods for long trips where packing light is required.

My son seemed excited about it. Said he wants to make his own trail food.

Great book!