Food 2

This is a second installment on my experiments with food. Today is all about success!

I was doing the Google and ran across this company: Shelf 2 Table freeze dried foods. I ordered the following four items:

Freeze Dried Beef Crumbles

Freeze Dried Diced Chicken

Freeze Dried Chicken Fajita Breast Strips

Freeze Dried Beef Taco Meat

So far I have tried two. And here is what I have done:

I decided to bump up a backcountry favorite by added some diced chicken.

This turned out very well!

My thought was to use a scale to add water until the weight of the chicken and water weighed the pre-drying weight of 8 ounces.

I then added this to a pot of cooked Ramen.

This turned out well because you can add both the soaking liquid and rehydrated chicken to the noodles. The result was tasty, and the texture of the chicken was as if it had just been cooked. I can highly recommend this.

I then tried the beef taco meat. I mentioned in my last post that I have seen pouches of refried beans in the stores, so my thought was to use those beans with rehydrated taco meat to make a burrito.

Out of the package, this is how it looks:

I tried the cold soak as before, and this is where I ran into some issues.

Since I did the experiment with the dried chicken I had the epiphany that I would not have a kitchen scale with me on trail. So I added an excess of water to the cold soak. The problem is, though, that you do not want a excess of water in the taco meat you are adding to a burrito. So basically, I should have added just a small amount of water, let it soak in, and add a little more as needed. Regardless, I did get a tasty burrito out of it.

The seasoning on the meat was perfect, and the texture was a very slight bit softer than fresh cooked taco meat but that could have been from added too much water to the soak.

So there we are – Two perfectly delicious meals that can be made in the backcountry using freeze dried proteins. Both of the items cost around $8 to $9, so not the least expensive option. But these can easily be mailed to a post office down trail via General Delivery, and can enjoy a nice treat every now and then.

I will post about the two other items I bought once I try them.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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