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

you asked for it so i am making dehydrated meals for backpacking not really a half cup i can't open it and i'm not a chef okay great [Music] this is my show gosh darn what's up friends my name is miranda and this is the most requested miranda in the wild video it happens to be winter so i'm making my favorite winter backpacking meals although realistically you could eat these year-round it's not that i don't like the meals that you can buy in the store but i just much prefer to make my own stuff so i'm gonna 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 can be inspired to make whatever you want so this is my dehydrator it's a little dirty it basically just sucks all of the moisture out of the food it dehydrates it that's why it's called a dehydrator if you don't own a dehydrator you can actually dehydrate your food on the lowest temperature setting in your oven but make sure you monitor it really carefully it's very easy to burn food dehydrating it in the oven so you have to really like keep an eye on it if you start to get really into dehydrating your own meals for backpacking i would highly recommend getting a dehydrator i think it's a worthwhile investment the one that i got is pretty inexpensive but there are some really nice ones that have like all sorts of different settings and gadgets and stuff the basic parts of the dehydrator that you'll find are a temperature gauge you can see this goes from 95 up to 160 and on mine you actually have a temperature guide on like how to dehydrate stuff the dehydrator itself will come with these trays like this you can get different inserts for your trays depending on the food that you're dehydrating so if you're dehydrating something really 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 gonna make you can get a tray like this you don't have to purchase this you can also use parchment paper so i'll show you how to do that cool now that we know what we're doing yay food so today i'm going to make a breakfast a lunch and a dinner option for backpacking my breakfast is a spiced pear and pecan oatmeal i forgot the pecans spiced pear pecan oatmeal without pecans for lunch i am making a lentil carrot soup and then for dinner i have a red cashew curry so these are all going to be vegan options um but super easy to add in whatever it is that you want with that let's make breakfast so i have my pears here i'm adding dates but you could also use date sugar or brown sugar some cinnamon then some coconut milk powder this is laird's unsweetened coconut milk creamer we actually saw this at rei you could also just use powdered milk but the coconut is a really good flavor the only thing that i'm actually dehydrating for this are the pears knife so i'm going to chop my pear into like really thin slices one thing with the dehydrator is that you should try and get stuff to be as even in size as possible because then it will dehydrate more evenly something like this then kind of what you want and then i'm going to cut these in half for these three meals that i'm making in my dehydrator i am 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 just dehydrate everything overnight and then be like ready to go in the morning oh another thing this pear is quite ripe you don't want any fruits really that are overly ripe because they have a lot of moisture in them already and it's going to take a long time to dehydrate now my hands are dirty so i have my pears here on my dehydrator to dehydrate they're spread out there's enough air around them and then this is gonna go in the dehydrator at 135 for roughly eight to ten hours then once this is dehydrated you're gonna have something like this this little guy they're still a little bit sticky just like dried fruit that you buy at the store and then in here and then i'm going to add my dates in the very first food video that we did somebody actually suggested date sugar in the comments and that was the first i'd ever heard of it so thank you whoever suggested that so we're adding our dates in here and then some cinnamon if you have cardamom cardamom's really good nutmeg i'm also going to add in a little bit of this powdered coconut milk and we'll seal this up give it good shake and there you have it this is breakfast so in this little stasher bag i have my dehydrated pears my half cup of oats i have about a tablespoon of coconut milk powder some cinnamon and then if i had pecans i would toss some pecans in here or really like any other crunchy thing that 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 little bit and you will have delicious oatmeal let's move on to lunch so the soup that i'm making is a carrot and lentil soup that i'm going to cook in a pot and then blend with my immersion blender or just like in a blender lentils actually dehydrate really really well so this is one of my favorite recipes to make ingredients i have my lentils red split lentils cook really fast that's what i'd recommend using for this i have an onion i have ginger a lime and then i have some carrots and then for spices i have turmeric cumin and paprika so i have two carrots here i'm just going to chop these roughly into like bite-sized pieces it doesn't need to be exact especially because this just gets cooked to the point that you can blend the carrots i mean honestly you're really just cooking them until they're like mushy like baby food so that doesn't get you excited about this meal i don't know what will all right cool so carrots in the pot and the next is ginger you can also use powdered ginger uh i just really really like fresh ginger cool and then we're gonna do half of this onion so same thing with the onion as with carrots we're just like chopping roughly all just goes in the pot so we have two carrots half of an onion a one inch piece of ginger in here and now we are going to add our lentils i have onion hands so we're doing a half cup of lentils [Applause] and now i'm gonna add my spices so for spices i have cumin and paprika which i'm gonna do a half teaspoon of each of those ish add spice to taste and then i'm adding about a teaspoon of turmeric this is really what gives it the like pretty orange yellowy color plus it's delicious this stuff is the best it might be my favorite spice ever i also like to add a little bit of chili powder to this but one thing i've noticed with 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 i dehydrate them it like dehydrates out and then it's not as spicy if you want to add something like cayenne or chili powder i would actually recommend doing it after you've dehydrated stuff cool so we have all of our ingredients in our pot here except for our lime juice i'm going to add one and a half cups of vegetable stock into this to cook it you can also use water or chicken stock or whatever i'm going to start with one and a half cups and then if i need to add more water as it's cooking i can do that and if you were just using water i would recommend adding a little bit of salt as well this is going to make a really thick soup the less liquid that we have the easier it is to dehydrate it and we're going to give this little stir and we're going to put it on our stove so as you can see there's like really just enough liquid in there so that we're covering the lentils but some of the vegetables aren't even fully covered that's what we want so we're going to put this guy on here what i'm going to do is i'm going to have this on high heat on my stove bring it to a boil and then i'll turn the heat down to a simmer and let it simmer for about 20 minutes or until the lentils are soft while this is cooking i'm actually going to zest and then juice my lime i should have brought my zester so i got this weird ass peeler this is terrible this would be like the worst lime zest ever all right so my soup has come to a boil and it smells so good i'm going to turn the heat down on here and let this simmer for about 20 minutes or until the lentils are soft with red lentils they'll actually start to break apart and that's really what you're looking for again since this is going to be blended we want the vegetables as soft as possible until everything is soft ah yeah all right oh look at how good this looks so it's been about 20 minutes as you can see my lentils have totally 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 it's a lot of suction in there okay great all right i've basically made baby food so here is my blended lentil carrot soup as you can see it's pretty smooth you're going for like a thick paste i feel like i can't emphasize that enough because the more water that's in here before you dehydrate it the longer it's going to take to dehydrate and that's just a huge pain in the butt so i'm going to add my lime i have the lime juice in afterwards so you like have that kind of like bright lime acidic taste on the soup this is also going to help keep the color of the soup when you dehydrate it at this point you can do a taste test make sure you like all the spices and flavors you can always add in some more stuff before you dehydrate it so i have this special tray for my dehydrator it's just like a plastic tray that fits into mine you can also just use parchment paper if that's what you have access to so we want the food to be totally cool before you dehydrate it so you don't have like extra steam and heat in here as the food is dehydrating this is especially important because i'm dehydrating multiple foods at once so once it's totally cool the dehydrator can basically like apply even heat to all the 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 really super easy and really tasty and so i wanted to try something that had like a little bit more flavor to it and uh this carrot lentil soup is delicious and this is going to also dehydrate for about eight to ten hours i have found that with food like this foods you like spread out it's best to be able to turn them over and after about six hours or eight hours in the dehydrator this will be sort of holy it'll be like broken apart and then i can just easily flip over the pieces of the soup and allow it to dehydrate for a little while longer so once this is dehydrated i'll then put it into a food processor to grind it into a powder this is what you get this bag here is all of this soup with all the liquid gone and then to rehydrate this if you add about eight ounces of water you're gonna have a really thick soup if you add you know all the way up to like 24 ounces of water you can have something a lot more liquidy the reason i can dehydrate all this stuff together is that none of it's particularly smelly if you have really smelly foods or dehydrating don't dehydrate them with other foods because then your all your foods will be smelly like jerky i hear that you should not dehydrate jerky with something like pears awesome i'm gonna clean up and then we will move on to dinner so the last meal that i'm making in my dehydrator is a red curry with cashews i'm going to get a nude tray for my dehydrator and there we have it so in my red curry cashew i am using rice as the base and then i have the powdered coconut milk that we used for breakfast as well as a red curry paste and then for vegetables i have broccoli and green beans and onion and some baby corn although really you could dehydrate any vegetables that you want again for this i'm just adding cashews as my protein but if you are a meat eater you can always add in some meats or even add in tofu so with the vegetables all i want to do is chop these into bite-size pieces our onion we are going to slice thinly if you have a mandolin mandolin is a great thing to use for dehydrator because you get everything really evenly and then our broccoli baby broccoli is actually perfect for this recipe as opposed to big heads of broccoli like this because it's already in like kind of small florets but i'm going to chop up some of this into like little tiny broccoli pieces comparison like what i'm doing versus like cooking shows is hilarious this is what it's actually like in my kitchen yeah this might look like a lot of vegetables because it is but it also just dehydrates down really small that's actually one of the coolest things about a dehydrator so you can put a bunch of stuff in a dehydrator and then it gets really small which is why it's great for backpacking which is why we're doing it so i'm going to pop the green beans and the broccoli in here if you're doing other vegetables put those in here as well the reason that i'm cooking them in water and not in oil and you'll notice i haven't used oil for any of my foods yet is because dehydrated oil gets rancid really quickly so actually to make this curry we're using dehydrated coconut milk or like powdered coconut milk rather than cooking it with coconut milk and then dehydrating it just because all that fat just yeah it goes goes bad very quickly and let's get some baby corn in here too i'm actually not going to cook my onion i'm just going to dehydrate it raw because i like raw onion cool so now i'm going to add just a little bit of water in here uh and then we will bring this to a boil cover it and let it simmer for like three to five minutes and just to lightly steam our vegetables broccoli away while that's doing that i'm going to spread out my onion on my dehydrator tray and work on prepping the other stuff i have to dehydrate oh one thing i forgot to mention is that after these are done cooking i'm going to drain the water and put them in cold water even ice water i just want to keep them from continuing to cook and then cool them down fast enough to put them in my dehydrator all right so now this is boiling i'm going to turn the heat down i'm just going to give it like a couple minutes you just want it to be like bright and like green like cool so i have my onions spread out in this tray i chopped up the entire half of that onion but there's a really big onion and i don't want to pack this any more full than it already is so i'm going to rotate to a new tray can we have magic hands fly in is that allowed [Music] great so i have a tiny piece of parchment paper here and i'm going to put about one and a half tablespoons of red curry paste onto this parchment paper so i'm just spreading this out into a thin layer on the parchment paper kind of like we did with the soup so that it dehydrates quickly oh yeah oh yeah okay cool so you can see those are done so bright green my broccoli is looking good i'm gonna go drain this and put it in cold water great bye all right great so here we have our veggies and again i just want there to be enough space around the vegetables so that they can get like enough airflow to dehydrate running out of space i'm going to take some of my lime zest i'm going to put that onto my curry paste like this and then put this on the tray where i have room as you can see this is kind of what you end up with with my curry paste after i dehydrated it on the parchment sheet i just like broke it apart it was for me a lot less brittle than like the soup was but if you have curry paste that dehydrates and becomes like really thick and brittle you can always just put it in your food processor or your blender and like blend it into a powder and then to rehydrate this at camp all i have to do is pour in about two to two and a half cups of boiling water close this up and let it sit for like 20 minutes and there you have a delicious coconut cashew curry really all it is is you just cook some vegetables a little bit you dehydrate them you dehydrate some curry paste and you throw it all together with instant rice i hope you found this video helpful if you want to see more dehydrated food videos let me know in the comments below if not and tell me a fun joke if you liked the video hit the like button and if you haven't already subscribe to the channel and i will see you all in the wild bye crazy hands dehydrator sounds like a mythical creature dehydrator you

Channel: REI

Views: 52,247

Rating: 4.9394169 out of 5

Keywords: rei, outdoors, sporting goods, adventure, miranda rei, rei miranda, miranda in the wild, dehydrated meals, how to dehydrate meals for camping, how to dehydrate meals for hiking, how to dehydrate meals for backpacking, dehydrate your own backpacking meals, dehydrated food, dehydrator, how to dehydrate food, how to use a dehydrator, easy dehydrated meals, how to backpack, how to hike, how to camp, camping food, backpacking food, vegan backpacking food, vegan food, plant based

Id: kxtuztOBlrw

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021