Dehydrating Food

menu_book picture_as_pdf book Caro Ryan Bushcraft Australia

Issue_6_August_2014-6

DEHYDRATING FOOD– GETTING STARTED

Caro Ryan

Let’s get something straight: I love food. I love good food.

Anything tastes good in the bush, especially if you’ve been walking all day, have just dumped your pack at camp, collapsed on the ground (sorry, I mean tested the ground surface for your tent), the fire’s going and the billy is on. Food in the outdoors can be more than just sustenance and fuel. Food can actually be really tasty.

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There are loads of prepared food options in your supermarket, and also food made specifically for outdoor recreations, taking the work out of preparing your own bushwalking food.

However, if you’ve got the time and are up for a bit of a kitchen adventure, I recommend dehydrating your meals. Dehydrating may sound complex and involved, but it’s actually really simple.

Confession: I’m no different to anyone else. I regularly feel overwhelmed with daily city life, and have fall-back overnight bushwalk food which I can grab at 10 pm on a Friday night from Woollies after rushing home to pack for a 6 am Saturday departure. However, I find that time spent planning and preparing my own food for dehydrating is a bit of an antidote to busy living, a kitchen meditation that draws from all those fabulous River Cottage warm and fuzzies, helping me feel connected to what I eat, and how it then helps sustain me on the trip.

For my first attempt I borrowed a dehydrator, something I definitely recommend if you want to give it a go. If you’re a member of a club, why not ask the Committee to buy a club dehydrator and add it to the gear that can be borrowed?

The Dehydrator

Dehydrators – like a series of trays with a hairdryer!

Dehydrators have a number of trays. The picture shows five trays sitting on the base tray. The bottom of each tray has grids, allowing air to flow freely throughout the trays and around the food. There are also solid inlay sheets which sit inside the trays, allowing you to dry liquids, sauces or fruit leathers. Some dryers have fine mesh inlay sheets. Dry air is generated in the lid section, which is very similar to a low voltage hair dryer. There are quite a few options on the market; see the list of URLs at the end. The Sunbeam Healthy Food Dryer has a low cost, around $100 new. You can pay up to $400, depending on the model and the functions available. For instance, a timer would be a helpful, something the Sunbeam model lacks. However, you can get around this by using a separate timer, a clock, or writing the time down.

Preparation

Broccoli keeps it’s colour if it’s blanched first!

Preparation is needed before placing the food in the dryer. At the easy end of the spectrum is simply slicing fruit or veggies into small pieces, with the other end involving preparing and cooking a full meal. Your manual should should have helpful advice and tables about the necessary preparation. Some veggies or fruit need prep such as dipping in lemon juice or blanching. From experience, these simple steps certainly enhance the end product; don’t skip this step.

‘...if you’ve got the time and are up for a bit of a kitchen adventure...

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Choosing what to dehydrate

When choosing meat to dry, the best way to be most effective is to use mince meat. You don’t want to get sick in the bush. Thankfully, there are many options at your local supermarket – beef, chicken, lamb, turkey, pork and for Aussies, kangaroo. (If you ask your butcher nicely, he will mince almost anything for you. Tripe anyone?) Almost everything that goes into the dryer will need to be sliced small to ensure that you get the most surface area, allowing the warm dry air to circulate around as much of the food as possible.

Butter Chicken after drying

Cook it up!

For this example, I cooked a big pot of lamb mince and used a packet sauce mix of Mussaman Lamb. I followed the recipe on the packet (except for using mince instead of pieces of meat), but also added my own small cut vegetables and fresh herbs.

Just make a normal meal – but use mince!

Drying

Once the preparation or cooking is done, place the food onto the trays in a single layer. Again, this is to ensure maximum space around the food to aid drying. Cut food should have spaces between each piece.

Slice things thinly and uniformly for best results.

Dishes with sauce or liquid need to sit on an inlay tray, and obviously not onto the normal mesh trays. With my dehydrator I can use the base tray for saucy dishes. Note that this base tray dries food quicker than any other area in the dryer, and you may wish to swap trays in the stack every hour or so. There is no definitive drying time for each food type as times depend not only on the size of each piece of food, but also the humidity, outside temperature, and how thin food is cut.

For example, I once dried Mussaman Lamb in December (Australian summer) and it took 14 hours to dry. Then, in April (Australian

‘You don’t want to get sick in the bush

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autumn) I dried Mussaman Lamb and it took 8 hours 15 minutes.

To make the most of your drying time, don’t just fill one or two trays. Put a meat dish into two trays, then fill the others with veggies. As each type of food will dry at different times, it is important to keep checking on them throughout the process. Each person will find a way that works for them in this; I tend to check after six hours which gives me an idea of what the overall time is going to be. If you’re doing this overnight, your alarm clock will become your noisy partner. The finished product will differ for each type of food. Your manual will give you a description of what to expect and how to know that the food is done. The best description I’ve heard for correctly dried mince meat, is kitty litter. Meow!

Dried Mince looking a bit like kitty litter!

Storing the dehydrated food

Once the food has dried and is cool, store meal portions in Ziploc bags. You’ll find that when it is dried it’s hard to figure out how much a portion is. So make this calculation before you dry. Look at your cooking pot and decide that how many dinners it will cover. Then divide the dried food into this many Ziploc bags. Keeping detailed notes about if a certain quantity suffices allows you to adjust the meal quantity for future trips.

Write the date and contents on the bag with indelible pen and place in the freezer.

Keep notes on your dehydrating efforts.

Check your manual for details on storage life. Keep a record of your dehydrating history, rating the humidity on the day and the start/finish times, along with any pre-treatment needed. This is how you can learn and tweak for the next time.

On the track

To make it easier, you may wish to add your other dry ingredients to the Ziploc bag before you head off on your trip. For example, add other dehydrated veggies such as Surprise Peas, beans or rice noodles. This way you have a full meal in a bag. When you arrive at camp, simply pop all the contents of the bag into a billy and cover with cold water. Meal in a bag!

Put the lid on to keep the crawlies out and set aside. Perfect time to light the fire and have happy hour! After an hour, simply place the billy over the heat. Check by tasting the meal. If it’s still chewy, continue to heat – leave the lid on and simmer. Stir frequently.

‘Perfect time to light the fire and have happy hour!

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What not to dry

Being a regular eater of tofu at home, I thought I’d give this a go for the track as well. Yes, it dried quite successfully, however (thankfully) I gave it a test rehydrate at home before risking taking it out into the bush.

Dehydrated Tofu - epic fail!

This photo shows the slice of tofu after sitting in water for 24 hours. The best way to describe the texture of it at this stage would be like the bicycle inner tube that I take as an emergency fire lighting tool. Sorry vegetarians… I tried. But I’m sure other people have managed to do it.

HOT TIP! Mince represents the major tip in choosing what to dry – good things come in small packages!

HOT TIP! Don’t dehydrate sweet and savoury at same time - a friend of mine dried pineapple in the same batch as a beef curry. The pineapple was disgusting!

HOT TIP! If you’re a busy person (who isn’t these days?) and you are trying to get a stack of dehydrating done for an upcoming extended trip, I suggest cooking up enough for dinner that night, and then putting all the leftovers into the dehydrator and letting it run through the night.