DEHYDRATED MEALS for Hiking and Camping! | Miranda in the Wild

You asked for it, so I'm making

dehydrated

backpacking

meals

, it's not really a half cup, I can't open it and I'm not a chef, okay, cool, this is my show, OMG, what's up guys? My name is Miranda and this is the best. I requested the video of Miranda in nature. It happens to be winter, so I'm making my favorite winter backpacking

meals

, although you can actually eat them all year round. It's not that I don't like foods you can buy at the store, but I just prefer to make my own things, so I'm going to show you that hopefully after this you'll have a good understanding of how to use a dehydrator to make your own backpacking food and then you'll be able to get inspired to do whatever you want, so this This is my dehydrator, it's a little dirty, it basically just sucks all the moisture out of the food, dehydrates it, that's why it's called a dehydrator.

If you don't have a dehydrator, you can dehydrate your food on the lowest temperature of your oven. but be sure to monitor it very carefully, it's very easy to burn food when dehydrating it in the oven, so be careful if you start dehydrating your own backpacking meals. I highly recommend you get a dehydrator. I think it's a worthwhile investment, the one I bought is pretty inexpensive, but there are some really good ones out there that have all kinds of different settings and devices, and the basic dehydrator parts you'll find are a temperature gauge that you can look at, this It goes from 95 to 160 and on mine you have a temperature guide on how to dehydrate things.

The dehydrator will come with these trays like this. You can get different inserts for your trays depending on the food you are dehydrating. So if you're dehydrating something very small, you can get a tray like this that still allows for better airflow or if you're making something like the soup we're going to make, you can get a tray like this, it's not necessary. buy this you can also use parchment paper so I'm going to show you how to make it great now that we know what we're doing yeah food so today I'm going to make a breakfast, lunch and dinner option for my backpacking breakfast.

It's a pear and walnut spiced oatmeal, I forgot the nuts, pear and walnut spiced oatmeal without nuts for lunch. I'm making a lentil and carrot soup and then for dinner I have a red cashew curry, so these will all be vegan options, but very easy to make. add whatever you want with that, we're going to make breakfast, so I've got my pears here. I'm adding dates, but you can also use date sugar or brown sugar, a little cinnamon, and then a little coconut milk powder. This is Laird's Unsweetened Coconut Milk Creamer. I saw this on Rei.

You can also use powdered milk, but coconut tastes really good. The only thing I'm really dehydrating is the pear knife, so I'm going to slice my pear very thinly. with the dehydrator is that you want to try to make things as uniform in size as possible because then they will dehydrate more evenly, something like this, pretty much what you want and then I'm going to cut them in half for these three meals. what I'm doing in my dehydrator, I'm actually going to dehydrate them all at once. One of the cool things about doing this is that if you have five trays in your dehydrator, you can dehydrate everything overnight and then be ready to use. in the morning, oh, another thing, this pear is quite ripe.

You really don't want any fruit that is overripe because it already has a lot of moisture and is going to take a long time to dehydrate. Now my hands are dirty so I have My pears here in my dehydrator to dehydrate they are spread out there's enough air around them and then this will go in the dehydrator at 135 for about eight to ten hours and then once it's

dehydrated

you'll have something like this, this small. Boy, they're still a little sticky like the dried fruits you buy at the store and then here and then I'll add my dates in the first food video we did, someone suggested sugar in the comments. and that was the first time I heard of it, so thank you to whoever suggested that, so we're going to add our dates here and then a little bit of cinnamon, if you have cardamom, the very good cardamom nutmeg, I'm going to add a little bit too . of this coconut milk powder and we'll seal it, shake it well and there you have it, this is breakfast, so in this little storage bag I have my dehydrated pears, my half cup of oats, I have about a tablespoon of coconut milk powdered. cinnamon and then if I had nuts I would add some nuts here or I would really like anything else crunchy you want to rehydrate this at camp all you have to do is add three quarters cup of boiling water and then let it sit for a while . a little bit and you will have delicious oatmeal let's move on to lunch so the soup I'm making is a carrot and lentil soup that I'm going to cook in a pot and then blend with my hand blender or I just eat the lentils in a blender.

It actually dehydrates very, very well, so this is one of my favorite recipes to make ingredients. I have my lentils. Split red lentils cook very quickly. That's what I would recommend using for this. I have an onion, I have ginger, lime and then some carrots. and then for spices, I have turmeric, cumin and paprika, so I have two carrots here. I'm just going to cut them into small pieces, they don't have to be exact, especially since they are cooked to the point that you can liquefy the carrots, I mean, honestly, you're really just cooking them until they're soft like baby food, so that doesn't get you excited about this meal, I don't know what will cool down, so carrots in the pot and next is ginger, you can also use ginger powder.

I really like fresh ginger and then we're going to make half of this onion, so the same with the onion as with the carrots, we just cut into large pieces, everything goes in. pot, so we've got two carrots, half an onion, a one inch piece of ginger here and now we're going to add our lentils. I have onion hands so we're doing half a cup of lentils and now I'm going to add my spices so for spices I have cumin and paprika which I'm going to do half a teaspoon of each of those fish and I'm going to add spices to taste and then I'm going to add about a teaspoon of turmeric, this is actually what gives it a nice yellow-orange color.

Plus it's delicious, this is the best, it might be my favorite spice. I also like to add a little chili powder to this, but one thing I've noticed when dehydrating and I have no idea if this is scientifically accurate or not, but it seems like when I add hot spices to things before dehydrating them, they dehydrate and then it's not so spicy. If you want to add something like cayenne or chili powder, I would actually recommend doing it after you've dehydrated the cold stuff, so I've got all of our ingredients in our pot here, except for our lemon juice.

I'm going to add a cup and a half of vegetable broth to this to cook it. You can also use water or chicken broth or whatever I'm going to start with. a cup and a half and then if I need to add more water while it's cooking I can do that and if you were just using water I would recommend adding a little salt too, this will make the soup less thick. The more liquid we have, the easier it will be to dehydrate and we're going to stir it up a little bit and put it on the stove so, as you can see, there's actually enough liquid in there for us to cover the lentils but some of the vegetables aren't even completely covered, that's what we want, so let's put this guy here.

What I'm going to do is have this on high heat on my stove. I'm going to bring it to a boil and then lower the heat to a simmer and let it simmer for about 20 minutes or until the lentils are soft while it's cooking, I'm actually going to zest and then squeeze my lime, I should have. I brought my zest so I bought this weird ass peeler this is terrible it would be like the worst lime zest ever so my soup has come to a boil and it smells so good I'm going to lower the heat and let this cook over low heat for about 20 minutes or until the lentils are soft with the red lentils, they'll actually start to break down and that's really what you're looking for again, since this is going to be blended, we want the vegetables to be as soft as possible. possible until everything is soft, ah yes ok look how good it looks it's been about 20 minutes as you can see my lentils have completely broken down which is great that's what I want now that all my vegetables are cooked, my lentils are super soft.

I'm going to blend this soup with my immersion blender, there's a lot of suction in there, okay, great, I've basically made baby food, so here's my lentil and carrot blended soup, as you can see it's pretty smooth. thick paste, I feel like I can't emphasize that enough because the more water in here before you dehydrate it, the longer it will take to dehydrate and that's a big pain in the butt, so I'm going to add my lime. add the lime juice afterwards so you like to have that kind of bright sour lime flavor in the soup.

This will also help maintain the color of the soup when you dehydrate it. At this point, you can do a taste test to make sure you like it. All the spices and flavors you can always add more things before dehydrating so I have this special tray for my dehydrator. It's like a plastic tray that fits in mine. You can also use parchment paper if that's what you have access to. so we want the food to be completely cold before we dehydrate it so that you don't have extra steam and heat in here while the food is dehydrating.

This is especially important because I'm dehydrating multiple foods at once, so once it's completely cool, basically the dehydrator likes to apply even heat to the entire food at once. I definitely have some big chunks of carrot in here, whatever the reason I decided to try this soup and make it is that I found that dehydrating dal like spiced lentils is actually super easy and really tasty, so I wanted to try something that had a little more of flavor and this carrot and lentil soup is delicious and will also dehydrate for about eight to ten hours. I've found that with foods like this like spread out, it's better to be able to turn them over and after about six or eight hours in the dehydrator, this will be kind of holy, it'll be kind of broken and then I'll be able to easily flip the soup pieces over and let it dehydrate for a little more time so once it's dehydrated I'm going to put it in a food processor to grind it into a powder this is what you get this bag here is all this soup without all the liquid and then to rehydrate this, If you add about eight ounces of water, you will have a very thick soup.

If you add up to 24 ounces of water, you can have something much more liquid, which is why I can dehydrate all of this. The whole thing is that nothing smells particularly bad. If you have very smelly or dehydrated foods, do not dehydrate them with other foods because then all your foods will smell like jerky. I heard you shouldn't dehydrate jerky with something like pears. Awesome. I'm going to clean up and then we'll move on to dinner, so the last meal I'll make in my dehydrator is red curry with cashews. I'm going to get a bare tray for my dehydrator and there we have it.

For my cashew red curry I am using rice as a base and then I have the coconut milk powder that we use for breakfast as well as a red curry paste and then for the vegetables I have broccoli, green beans, onion and some corn tender, although actually You could dehydrate any vegetables you want again, for this I'm just adding cashews as a protein, but if you're a carnivore you can always add some meats or even add tofu, so with the vegetables all I want to do is chop them. In small pieces, we are going to cut our onion into thin slices if you have a mandoline.

The mandoline is great to use as a dehydrator because you get everything very evenly and then our baby broccoli broccoli is really perfect for this recipe instead of the big heads. of broccoli like this because it's already in kind of little florets, but I'm going to cut some of this into little pieces of broccoli. The comparison of what I'm making versus cooking shows is hilarious, this is actually what my cooking is like, yes this may seem like a lot of vegetables because it is, but it also dehydrates very small, which is actually one of the best things from a dehydrator, so you can put a lot of things in a dehydrator and then it gets very small, which is why it's great for backpacking, that's why we're doing it, so I'm going to put the green beans and the broccoli here.

If you're making other vegetables, put them here too, the reason I'm cooking them. in water and not in oil and you will notice that I have not used oil for any of my food yet because dehydrated oil goes rancid very quickly, so to make this curry we are using dehydrated coconut milk or coconut milk powder. instead of cooking it withcoconut milk and then dehydrate it just because all that fat, yeah, it goes bad very quickly and let's put some sweet corn in here too. I'm not actually going to cook my onion, I'm just going to dehydrate it. raw because I like raw onion cold so now I'm going to add a little bit of water here and then we're going to bring this to a boil and cover it and let it simmer for about three to five minutes and just to steam lightly. our veggies and broccoli while I'm at it, I'll spread the onion out on my dehydrator tray and work on prepping the other things I need to dehydrate oh, one thing I forgot to mention is that after they're done cooking, I'm going to drain the water and the I'm going to put them in cold water, even ice water, I just want to keep them from continuing to cook them and then cool them down quickly enough to put them in my dehydrator, so now this is boiling, I'm going to lower the heat, I'm just going to give it a couple of minutes, you just want it to be shiny. and I eat green, I eat fresh, so I have my onions spread out on this tray.

I cut the whole half of that onion, but there is a very large onion and I don't want to pack this any fuller than it already is, so I'm going to rotate it to a new tray. Can we get magic hands in? Is allowed. Great, so I've got a little piece of parchment paper here and I'm going to put about a tablespoon and a half of red curry paste on this parchment paper. I'm just spreading this out in a thin layer on the parchment paper, like we did with the soup so it dehydrates quickly. Oh yeah oh yeah.

Okay, great, so you can see that they're ready, such a bright green color. My broccoli looks good. I'm going to drain this and put it in cold water. Bye, okay, great, here we have our vegetables and again I just want there to be enough space around the vegetables so that they can have enough airflow to dehydrate and run out of space. I'm going to take some of my lime zest, put it in my curry paste like this and then put it in the tray where I have room, as you can see this is what you end up with my curry paste after dehydrating it on the parchment sheet, I just tore it up, for me it was much less crumbly than the soup, but if you have curry paste that dehydrates and becomes very thick and crumbly, you can always put it. in your food processor or your blender and blend it into a powder and then to rehydrate it at camp all I have to do is pour in about two to two and a half cups of boiling water, close this and let it sit for about 20 minutes. minutes and there you have a delicious coconut and cashew curry.

Really, all it is is a little cook some vegetables, dehydrate them, dehydrate some curry paste and mix it all with instant rice. I hope you found this video useful if you like. For more dehydrated food videos, if not, let me know in the comments below and tell me a funny joke. If you liked the video, hit the like button and if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, I'll see you all in the

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