If you’re headed out on a wilderness expedition, there are some excellent quality and tasty specialty hiking foods on the market nowadays. They can basically be split up 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 stated number of calories) but is in general significantly dearer.

If you are heading out on anything apart from a short hike, maybe for 2 nights camping out, then anything apart from dehydrated food is going to be much too heavy.

From an alternative perspective, while you can carry the same nutrition for a significantly lower weight with dehydrated food, and therefore carry supplies for longer backpacking walks, the price of dehydrated food starts mounting up.

Therefore if we’re on a budget and want to keep the weight down, what can we do?

Well one very simple option is pasta. Pasta is the ideal dehydrated energy food. It’s full of complicated carbohydrates and all you need to do is add water. Cooking time is low (say matched against rice) and so you also don’t use a huge quantity of fuel. If you would like to be super healthy, take wholemeal pasta, which also contains a large amount of the B-vitamins you need to make use of the carbohydrates efficiently.

But we will not live on carbohydrates alone. We also need some protein and fat. Even though many folks in developed nations have too much fat in their diet during everyday life, when you’re hiking for day after day you will be burning fat. Also, if the temperature is cold you will want 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 as an example. 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-toxic).

The cooked chorizo is mouth-watering by itself cooked like this or you can add it to another dish like a straightforward tomato-based pasta sauce. You can make a pasta sauce on the trail with a packet of powdered Bolognese sauce combined with a powdered tomato soup. This can then be mixed with your pasta. Easy, succulent, light, nutritional calorific and inexpensive.

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.

Tags: Canoeing

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