How to Find Alternative Foods to Pricey Specialist Hiking Meals ...

If you?re headed out on a wilderness expedition, there are some very good quality and mouth-watering specialty hiking foods on the market nowadays. They can essentially be separated into 2 types: hydrated and dehydrated.

Hydrated meals are slightly cheaper but they are also a lot heavier. One of the most heavy parts of this kind of food is water.

De-hydrated food is a lot lighter than hydrated food (for a given number of calories) but is generally quite a bit costlier.

If you?re heading out on anything other than a short hike, perhaps for two nights camping out, then anything aside from dehydrated food is going to become far too heavy.

Alternatively, while you can carry the same nourishment for a noticeably lower weight with dehydrated food, and thus carry supplies for longer backpacking hikes, the cost of dehydrated food starts mounting up.

Hence if we are on a budget and need to keep the weight down, what are we able to do?

Well one extremely simple option is pasta. Pasta is the ideal dehydrated energy food. It?s full of complicated carbohydrates and all you have got to do is add water. Cooking time is low (say compared against rice) and so you also don?t use a big quantity of fuel. If you want to be super healthy, take wholemeal pasta, which also contains lots of the B-vitamins you need to use the carbohydrates efficiently.

But we can?t live on carbohydrates alone. We also require some protein and fat. Although many people in developed states have too much fat in their diet during day-to-day life, when you are hiking for day after day you?ll be burning fat. Also, if the temperature is cold you will require more calories and you?ll be burning more fat. You?ll also benefit from the thermogenic properties of protein.

Therefore if you would like protein and fat content on a hike, with very little waste packing (and therefore little extra poundage), then dry cured sausage such as chorizo is a productive means of carrying it. It is also pretty tasty.

You can eat it as it comes, without any cooking, with crackers or bread for instance. Or you can cook it: fry it in a pan (cut the sausage into 2-inch/4cm sections and slice down the middle or cut it into slices) or slice it relatively thin, skewer it on a (non toxic) green-wood stick and kebab it over your campfire (NB ensure the wood you are burning is also non-poisonous).

The cooked chorizo is delicious on its own cooked like this or you are able to add it to another dish such as a simple tomato-based pasta sauce. You can make a pasta sauce on the trail with a packet of powdered Bolognese sauce mixed with a powdered tomato soup. This could then be combined with your pasta. Straightforward, flavorsome, light, nutritive calorific and cheap.

For other options, just remember this: minmise the water content for the calories contained and ensure you have a good balance of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. And after you start seeing the possibility in familiar foods there?s masses of other foodstuff on the shelves of your area store that can be used in similar ways.

Paul Kirtley is a professional outdoorsman and bushcraft instructor. He runs an organization that specialises in bushcraft courses and wilderness expeditions.

Source: http://articlesmanifesto.com/travel-leisure/outdoors-travel-leisure/how-to-find-alternative-foods-to-pricey-specialist-hiking-meals

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