When she sets up camp at the end of a long day of hiking in the Rocky Mountains, the last thing Renee Botta wants to do is cook. So she doesn’t.
Instead, Botta pulls out a collection of plastic freezer bags, chooses that night’s fare, then boils water.
Her fellow backpackers couldn’t be more pleased. Instead of another round of backcountry staples like peanut butter on tortillas or handfuls of mixed nuts and chocolate, Botta will make a pot of curry sweet potato stew, red curry lentil stew, homemade guacamole or backcountry burritos. All it takes is adding hot water and waiting.
“Basically any food out there can be dehydrated,” she said.
Botta, of Evergreen, Colo., has been dehydrating fruits and vegetables for 30 years. The process of removing the liquid from food is simple enough and can be done in the oven or with a dehydration machine, which ranges in price from $40 to more than $100.
“There are really fancy dehydrators out there, but I don’t have one,” Botta said. “You don’t need it.”
The University of Denver professor of health communication turns to favorite websites like Backpacking Chef and Dirty Gourmet for recipes. She recommends those sites for beginners interested in learning about dehydrating meals.
Glenn McAllister, who divides his time between Zurich, Switzerland, and Waleska, Georgia, launched the Backpacking Chef a decade ago to share his passion for dehydrating food. He lists recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and desserts, and shares menus for long camping trips.
McAllister tries to include vegetables, a starch such as rice, and a meat or other protein in each meal, tying them together with “bark” — a starchy vegetable such as potatoes or beans that dehydrate into brittle chunks. When reconstituted, the bark becomes a flavorful sauce.
He has one hard-and-fast safety rule: Avoid fatty foods, such as pork, sausage and cheese.