Freeze Dried Camping Foods

There are Many Kinds of Delicious Freeze Dried Camping Foods

Freeze dried camping foods are a terrific solution for an age old problem - how to eat while away from home.

When you're camping, you carry your food in your recreational vehicle, pickup truck or SUV -- or, you're "really" camping out -- on your back.

You don't want to carry any more pounds than necessary. When you're hiking along a trail for five or more miles, each pound becomes a living weight on your shoulders. They slow you down, make the experience unpleasant and can even be dangerous.

If you are going through rough terrain of mud, heavy underbrush or many rocks, each additional pound can burden your ankles. And if you start to slip, it makes it harder for you to regain your balance, making you more likely to fall -- and land hard. If you're crossing a stream or fording a river, it's more difficult to remain on your feet, more likely to slide on a wet, mossy rock, and get thoroughly drenched. In deep water it can pull you below the surface.

Your backpack has to carry not only food, but a sleeping bag, a tent, clothes, and cookware. There's no room for anything extra.

Even if you're on a trail with horses or mules to help, or rafting down a river, or riding a trail on a mountain bike, you don't have room for excess weight.

Yet there's nothing like fun and exercise outdoors to make you even hungrier than usual.

Freeze Dried Camping Foods are Lightweight and Convenient

With freeze dried camping foods you can take along vacuum packed zipper pouches. They're waterproofed in case you're rained on or do take a fall into a river. The food has been quickly dehydrated (98% of water removed) by the freeze drying process so there's about four ounces to carry, but it will become a full pound meal serving after you add water back in and cook it. Because they've been vacuum-packed, there's no air. The pouches can be folded easily so every meal takes up only a little room in your pack.

A week's worth of meals (7 days times 3 meals per day) is only twenty-one ounces, or less than a pound and a half.

One of the best known freeze dried camping foods companies is Mountain House. They also make a Mountain Oven, or Flameless Heating Kit. It comes with five heat activation pads, and is designed to heat up the packets of Mountain House freeze dried foods. One Mountain Oven is good for heating five meals. This could be a lifesaver in mountainous or desert country where firewood is scarce. Or even in a wooded area after a rain, with all available stick soaking wet. One of them weighs 14 ounces, just under a pound.

Or maybe you're still flint and steel set to strike sparks to set off some dry wood shavings. It can work. I did that as a Boy Scout.

You Can Cook Freeze Dried Camping Foods With a Mountain Oven

As a Boy Scout, every place we went camping were accessible by a parent or scoutmaster with boxes of food loaded into a station wagon. We had to prepare our own meals from scratch -- quite a chore for boys used to mothers making meals from kits -- and washing up.

That was fun, but it wasn't exactly how Liver Eating Johnson, Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone did it -- let alone how the Indians themselves.

And, yes, sometimes we simply stuck marshmellows on a stick and roasted them over the open fire. Well, marshmellows are so light it's easy to carry them along if you want to. And they're also easy to squeeze into your backpack even when you think there's no more room. To paraphrase the old commercials for Jello, there's always room for marshmellows if you really want them.

But to keep going on a rough trail or even just to enjoy hanging around a campground, you want a filling meal that will stick to your ribs, and that's when you'll really appreciate freeze dried camping foods.

Next: Dried Fruits -- raisins, and so on.