Customer Reviews

Trail Food: Drying and Cooking Food for Backpacking and Paddling

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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've had this book for a few years now, and have read it cover to cover several times.It gives good advice on how to dry everything from plain vegetables to your leftover dinner.I even started to dehydrate my own eggs,and let me tell you they come back wonderfully.Great book that will have you tossing aside those $6.00 nasty premade meals.

Time was, drying food was a real pain and involved an old stove and a lot of attention. Now, with the proliferation of dryers on the market, anyone can dry, meat, fish, fruit and veg. The problem is that, in a lot of places, The how of drying is still a closely guarded secret.

No more. This is an excellent introduction to drying, and you don't need to be an expert to start either. Wanna dry? Get this book.

This is an excellent, concise guide to the process of drying as well as impetus to get the canoe onto the top of the car. While Kesselheim does give instructions detailed enough for the most persnickity among us, he also describes method, allowing the use of the imagination. Good tips, good recipes, wonderful guidelines -- and some memories to start the inner loon calling. Very glad I have this book.

If you're looking for condensed information and ideas on how to purchase & use a food dehydrator, preserve fruits vegetables and mushrooms, meats for home use, as well as ideas for planning back country packing meals, this is a very good little book.

KESSELHEIM knows how to appeal to a useful purpose and makes a simple process an ease to work with. His book is what everyone should have on their bookshelf or carry a copy in your backback with some blank paper and pencil to plan future trail meals. You don't need glitz to be good. Christopher D. BORDEN - RCMP - Northern BC

As a boyscout leader, we like to outdo the scouts on our creative cooking to inspire their creativity. It is a great book, to show how to make creative meals without the weight of heavy food items. This has been great!! Thanks C>

I got this primarily for the food drying ideas and was impressed by how much information is in it. Fantastic for backpackers and hikers, I'll use some of these techniques for food storage in my home as well and for making soup mixes that can be made easily when my family is in a rush. The author suggests precooking foods like rice and noodles, then dehydrating them so they cook faster.
There are extensive tables explaining what texture your finished dried food should be at, tips for storage and many recipes. Some of them are vegetarian and many of them could be easily adapted to being vegan as well.
He also includes plans for building your own food dehydrators, one heated by a light bulb, the other, solar.
A wonderful inspiring book for finding new ways to pack nutritious and good meals.

Trail Food by Alan S. Kesselheim is a spectacular little read for anyone interested in adventuring in the outdoors, self reliance, preperation, or even just making healthy snacks at home for a fraction of the price of storebought. Encouraging, practical, and written by an obviously experienced author, Trail Food helped enhance my outdoor experience. If you're still buying those freeze dried meals or even worse living off of ramen noodles when you're out in the wilds, I really suggest you consider dehydrating your own food, and this book is a great place to start. In addition to dehydration the author seasons the book with a bunch of other tidbits. There's little blurbs about the pros and cons of cooking over fires and various stoves, advice on setting up the camp kitchen, and at the beginning of every chapter there's a little blurb of a story about canoeing, backpacking, dogsledding, or just cabin living, that helped get me in that outdoorsy frame of mind. My two dehydrators are going to be working overtime!

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. :)