Backpack Gourmet: Good Hot Grub You Can Make at Home, Dehydrate, and Pack for Quick, Easy, and Healthy Eating on the Trail [Paperback]

Linda Frederick Yaffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2002

Meals on the trail can be as delicious and varied as meals prepared at home. You can create meals to suit your tastes or diet--vegetarian, low fat, Asian, Italian. Meals prepared and dehydrated at home are compact and lightweight, perfect for the backpacker, and safer than packing perishable foods. The author shows how to prepare the meals so that they will travel well and will be easy to reconstitute in camp. The easy step-by-step instructions detail how to cook and dry lightweight, satisfying meals at home and then prepare them easily in camp--truly complete, instant meals. Includes over 160 recipes for soups, stews, pasta, casseroles, and breakfast and snack ideas as well as tips on drying food in a dehydrator or oven.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Yaffe, a librarian, camper, and author of High Trails Cookery, offers more than 150 recipes for hikers seeking an alternative to the expensive, often boring, freeze-dried prepared meals that are sold in stores. Most of them are for dishes that are completely cooked at home and dried in an electric dehydrator (or an oven), then simply rehydrated with boiling water, requiring no further cooking at the campsite. There are also trail snacks and other no-cook recipes, as well as cookies, muffins, and other baked goods. Some of the recipes are vegetarian, while others offer vegetarian (or vegan) options. For larger collections and others where camping and hiking books are popular.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The more adventurous camper will turn to Linda Yaffe's Backpack Gourmet. She offers fish jerky as well as the beef variety, and she leads her band of outdoorspersons into an elaborate world of breakfasts, snacks, and dinner dishes. She insists that complex-sounding dishes such as crab fettuccini and portobello curry need not be beyond the reach of the backwoodspeople. For the less sophisticated frontier cook, hot dog stew and peanut butter fudge make satisfying outdoor meals. There are also recipes for fruit leather and similar easily transportable snacks. She also offers guidelines on choosing cooking equipment for campers and on techniques for ensuring all-important freshwater supplies in the backcountry. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 147 pages
• Publisher: Stackpole Books; illustrated edition edition (December 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811726347
• ISBN-13: 978-0811726344
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.2 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Outdoor Cooking > Camping & Hiking
  • #33 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Miscellaneous > Reference
  • #42 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Hiking & Camping > Camping

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

100 of 103 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Not enough variety January 31, 2006

By Grumman Gal

Format:Paperback

This was the first backcountry cookbook I bought. I was looking for recipes that could be mostly assembled at home, would be lightweight to transport, and were easy to cook over a backpacking stove.

On first glance, this book appeared to fit the bill. Most recipes are assembled at home, dehydrated, and then rehydrated as a one-pot meal. However, I tried several recipes this past summer while canoeing and camping in the BWCAW and found the texture and taste of most of the meals to be disappointing. Many of the same ingredients are used over and over in "different" recipes, so many meals taste the same. Also, since the recipes are twice-cooked, the texture is often mushy.

Shortly after purchasing this book, I also bought Lipsmackin' Backpackin'. I ended up using this book for almost all of our camping meals, supplemented by hummus and candied walnuts, and a few other random recipes from Backpack Gourmet. I don't think that the purchase of Backpack Gourmet was offset by the few recipes that we regularly use.

I would recommend buying a different backcountry cookbook if you are intersted in eating something with flavor and texture. If, however, you aren't interested in flavor, but are simply looking for a meal that can be made quickly at camp and has all the calories and nutrients you need, then this is probably the book for you.

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Changed my backpacking life! March 18, 2007

By K. Hunt

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is the book I have been waiting for. I love to cook, I love to eat, and I love to backpack, and this book lets me enjoy all three. Previously, I was one of those backpackers who ate mac-n-cheese and Lipton noodles over and over and over. It was really boring, and I wasn't getting enough protein in my diet. Getting ready for our epic 4 month hike on the PCT this summer, I wanted to try food dehydrating, but I also needed a recipe book. After lots of online research I ordered this book and "Trail Food" by Alan Kesselheim. Kesselheim and Yaffe have completely different approaches, and I find Yaffe's approach far more user-friendly. You DO NOT want to mess with drying each food item separately and then trying to assemble them in the backcountry. You are tired, you are hungry. You do not want to spend lots of time messing with ten different little baggies and jars of spices and oils. Leave all of that at home. Yaffe's approach is simple and elegant, and I'm quite honestly shocked that more people don't do it this way: You make your soup, stew, pasta dish or casserole in the comfort of your home. The key is that you must keep the chunks of vegetables, etc. very small. You then spread the dish in thin layers on your dehydrator trays and let the dehydrator do all of the work. Just this weekend, we went backpacking and ran the true field test: rehydrating all of the foods that I had previously dehydrated. The results were impressive. Breakfast casseroles, delicious spaghetti for dinner, tuna and bruschetta spreads at lunch, and none of it had that preservative-laden flavor that store-bought foods are cursed with. The only two comments I would make where Yaffe didn't get it quite right are that I can't fit the whole dish into the dehydrator (if you only have four trays like I do), so we usually end up eating some of it for dinner (not a bad thing). The second thing is that her recommended drying times seem a bit too short. I've had to add an extra hour or two to many of the recipes, but again, this is not a big deal as I dry most of this stuff overnight anyway. If you are looking for a lightweight backpacking meal solution, you cannot live without this book!

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars They are wrong, and she is right! February 26, 2007

By J. Parker

Format:Paperback

If you are going to buy a book about backpack dehydrating this is the one. I have read several others and beat my brains out trying to get spagetti sauce to powder, etc. They are all wrong, and she is right. Don't try to dehydrate the ingredients separately, cook the whole meal and then dehydrate the whole thing together. It seems too good to be true, but it really works, and it works both easier and better. Make it your own way (within a few simple limits), and it really is better, cheaper, and easier than buying the commercial deydrated foods. I might have thought of it myself, if all of the other books weren't so misleading!