My Favorite Food on the PCT

hey y'all Dixie here today I want to talk to you about a backpackers favorite subject and that is food I want to talk to you about some of the favorite meals that I ate while on the Pacific Crest Trail and you know I'll kind of throw in some of what I've seen other people do and maybe that'll help you all have some creativity with your backpacking meals or you know if you're planning your first backpacking trip then it'll help you know kind of what people generally carry out onto the trail with them first I'm gonna go over cook meals so meals that you would cook because I generally carry a stove so then I will also go over meals that require no cooking because for a short period of time on the PCT I had no stove and I'll also go over some snacks and things like that at the end so let's get started first things first let's start with the breakfast because it's the most important meal of the day right for breakfast I start off with coffee because I can't even think about getting out of my sleeping bag until I have that so I have my coffee and most of time I'll either mix it with powdered milk and honey or I mix it with like a breakfast essentials or hot chocolate sure they're sugary you know but they've got calories and that's what you need while you're backpacking and exerting yourself that much and then while I'm sipping my coffee I'll have oatmeal now I know some people tend to get bored of oatmeal I haven't really gotten too tired of it yet but I'll have oatmeal might mix it up with like cream of wheat or grits and my friend perks swears that if you mix the three together that you burn them at different rates because they're different grains so they last you longer in the morning don't know if that's true or not that's just something he claims I've never tried it but so I'll eat one of those like breakfast cereals that you do cook and if I want to kick it up a notch then I might add like dehydrated fruit to the oatmeal and then to the grits I might add like bacon bits and cheese my main thing is is even if I'm cooking in the morning generally I try to make it something pretty quick like oatmeal because I want to get packed up and you know get out of camp and start my day off and I'm not very good at waking up early the great thing about oatmeal packets or cream of wheat or grits is that if you don't want to put it in your pot you don't have to so it's kind of miss free and again helps you speed things up in the morning you can just pour your hot water right into the oatmeal packet stir it and eat it right out of there and again that sage from you know having a pot to clean for lunch I tend to take you know a good at least hour-long break or so just to give my feet a rest but I don't want to be cooking and cleaning that whole time so again if I'm gonna cook for lunch and I try to do something that's pretty quick and you know not too messy most of the time I'm cooking ramen noodles and I like to mix things into them bring my noodles are so versatile you can really add anything to them you could put in jerky if you wanted to some people put in peanut butter and all sorts of things I just can't do peanut butter anymore I got myself worn out on that on the 80 but but yeah Raymond noodles I mean it's basically like a canvas and you can paint whatever picture of a meal that you would like to have you know you get sick of something if you do it the same exact way for too long before we started the PCT perk gave me some mushrooms and some seaweed that he had found at an Asian food market and I portioned it out and then had my mom since I'm to me along the way but in the Sierra Nevada for lunch I had that a lot I would just do the oriental flavored ramen noodles and then put in mushrooms and seaweed you know when it got close to cooking it and it's something that doesn't take a lot of fuel again it's it's pretty quick and it's not like something too saucy so it's real easy to clean out of the pot if I got sick of doing reimann noodles for lunch I might do a pasta sides because those are generally pretty quick in cook time my favorite one hands down is the fettuccine alfredo a lot of times I'd pack out spinach the desert was a little hot for that you know it would go wilty pretty quick but I mean if you're in cooler weather or even just like moderate temperatures spinach will last you three to four days easily so I just throw in a handful of spinach and you know I could have put those mushrooms in there also that I was talking about with the ramen noodles but really anything could go in fettuccine alfredo also they have like the full packets of chicken grilled chicken so you could dump that in there you know and be real fancy some people also like to mix tuna with their noodles but that's another thing peanut butter and tuna and pretty much almost done for life on those I can handle them very sporadically but again the 80 just totally ruined me on that alright so for dinner time now dinner time is where you're relaxing you know you're enjoying the end of the day you're hanging out with people so I don't mind dinner taking a little bit longer to cook or maybe more water so if you're camped near a water source and you can have all the water you want then I might cook something like mac and cheese because it takes a good amount of water to boil all those noodles so just like kraft mac and cheese some people have done shells and cheese i never did those on trail because i heard that it kind of made you sick or constipated so i never tried those but like regular kraft mac and cheese I could eat a whole box myself no problem and I began to be like this mac and cheese connoisseur you know I'd try like the Walmart brand and Kraft and the Dollar General brand and you know just see which ones I liked and honestly I kind of liked all of them but you want to do mac and cheese like I said we probably are at a water source or you just have a plethora of water on you because it does take a good bit and I didn't add anything to my mac and cheese I know some people like to add sriracha or bacon bits but to me mac and cheese is perfect just the way it is so why mess it up something else it takes a little bit more water than like ramen noodles or pasta sides is mashed potatoes but mashed potatoes are also a very versatile meal because you can do anything like jerky or you know bacon bits for me I really liked cheese bacon bits and then mayonnaise I never thought about that until towards the end on the PCT but if you scored a packet of mayonnaise and some mashed potatoes they are heavenly also it'll add extra calories for just a little extra weight lunch and dinner is interchangeable for the most part like in the real world but it's just gonna be you know where you're located at the time do you have time and do you have water because mashed potatoes don't take that long but they take you know at least two cups of water where pasta sides don't take much water or time and then mac and cheese takes a long time and a lot of water so you know it just depends but you'll learn all that as you go and of course there are like the prepackaged dehydrated meals and one of my favorite ones was paleo meals to go I just feel like I get so many carbs along the way and I know you need carbs but I felt like I ate so much junk so to have a meal that was mainly meat and vegetables I just really liked that and while I didn't eat them for every meal most of time I would treat myself to a paleo meals to go at dinner time next I'm gonna talk about non cook so I was like why on earth would anyone go out backpacking and not carry a stove because to me it's such you know pick me up to have a hot meal during the day or after a long day of hiking but there are reasons you know maybe there's a bad weather stretch coming up and you know for a few days you're not gonna want to take the time to cook lunch while it's raining or maybe you want to save the weight of a stove and fuel and you just don't want it at all also maybe you're going through dress stretches and you don't want to have to worry about toting more water to cook lunch in a dry area and then also you might want to save time so you might be pushing yourself really hard to get a lot of miles done and you just don't want to take the time to sit down and cook and for me that's what it was the first stretch that I went nan cook on the PCT I bounced my stove ahead because perk and I were doing the 24 hour challenge and I knew that I wasn't gonna take the time to sit down you know and cook a meal is gonna be more like prop my feet up shove something in my face and then keep going it ended up being a nightmare because where I bounced my stove ahead to I didn't get there in time so I ended up being several weeks without a stove and so I got more familiar with non cooking I still have my coffee I just mixed the instant coffee packet with cold water and an instant breakfast and just shook it up and while it wasn't as good as being hot when you're an addict you got to have that fix for breakfast my favorite thing was still oatmeal I just didn't heat it up and it actually rehydrates really well and honestly I think that cold oatmeal might taste better than hot oatmeal and if it wasn't for me liking something warm on cold mornings then I probably would just not heat it up at all and if I had known that in the warmer stretches I you know probably would have saved fuel and for my oatmeal I would still throw in blueberries strawberries bananas you know just anything to just spice it up a little bit I also really like donuts and pop-tarts as far as the donuts go I think powdered sugar and the coconut ones are definitely my favorite and then pop-tarts the brown sugar cinnamon towards the end even when I had my stove I started eating Cheerios with powdered milk and bananas and strawberries and blueberries and that was absolutely delicious I've done other types of cereal but just having the Cheerios and then some kind of fruit to add to my was really really good so for lunch during my non cook stretches a lot of times I just ate snacks so I just kind of snacked all day I would have like a dedicated breakfast and dinner but I was snack although through the day but if I was gonna have a dedicated lunch then I really enjoyed eating Fritos and frito bean dip the crunch of the Fritos I mean they hold together pretty well a lot of times if you pack out chips they end up just like chip dust but the Fritos you know hold together pretty well and just to dip in him in that bean dip it was heavenly for a while I traded my friend milestone some kind of snack that I had in my pack for her powdered hummus and little individual packets that she had of Olives and I would eat that for lunch with some crackers that she also had so you get tired of things on the trail when you eat something you know over and over and over and she had done a lot of prepackaged meals and you know had packages sent to her and things so she was sick of hummus by the time I met her and so it was nice to be able to trade you know whatever I was sick of him I pack for that hummus and that's something that I'll probably do for the CDT is playing some of the the powdered hummus and the the olives probably my favorite thing for dinner during my no cook stretch was tortilla pepperoni or summer sausage cheese preferably pepperjack and again she's will last a few days just like spinach avocado and spinach and wrap it all up and that thing was good and if you're a sausage person you could throw some mayo on it or you know if you can find ranch packets or something like that those were my favorite meals as far as non cooking goes I did notice that probably the food that I carried during my non cooked stretches was a little bit heavier than the food I carried when I was cooking because most of it's something that has to be you know rehydrated with water one thing that you could do though if you wanted to know cook and you didn't want to carry some of that heavier stuff you could do cold soaking and I didn't do that while I was on the trail it's something that I might test out on the CDT just so I could give some input but you can get like a peanut butter jar or some kind of Tupperware that has a screw on lid and do something like couscous Raymond noodles instant rice you know just something that kind of rehydrates pretty quickly so you just pour that stuff in the container pour some water in there let it soak for a while you know depending on what it is it might take longer than other things mashed potatoes rehydrate almost instantly now they're gonna be cold so it might not be as good to you but is something that you could probably get used to I've heard that Raymond noodles with some Mayo squirted in it mixed up is pretty good kind of like a cold pasta and especially if you added olives or something like get that in there then that'd probably be pretty good but just keep in mind that cold soaking is an option you know even if you want to carry some of those things that do need to be rehydrated a lot of times when people decide not to cook they don't want to carry a dedicated pot because they're not gonna be cooking but you could use like a mug and just carry it to have something to put on a fire if you want to heat up some water and pour into your Tupperware if you decide you do want a warm meal on a cold night so next I want to talk about snacks which are like my favorite thing in the world while I'm on trail I was absolutely sick of bars protein bars you know like Clif bars kind bars all that stuff I can still do kind bars a little bit but I'm done with Clif bars so I just wanted to come up with some kind of snack that was easily accessible but just wasn't the same old saying that I had had on the 80 and worn myself out on my saving grace on the PCT was Snickers I can't tell you how much I love those so when I would resupply in town I would make sure I got one Snickers for each day because that way I could cheer me up if I was having kind of a bad part of the day or you know at the end of the day while I was cooking dinner I could eat my Snickers and I don't know it's just something that I was able to look forward to and I think little things like that are important while you're out on trail I also really love skittles and for some reason that was like my going to town snack so the day that I was heading into town for some reason skittles just would fire me up you know and eating those would get me excited about going to town I also really loved cheez-its and gummy snacks I don't know gummies were like my life for a while and I mean that could be anything from like sour worms to like the Scooby Snack gummies they didn't matter if it was gummy it was good I also packed out some marshmallows at one point and really supplies to do s'mores for a night and then we ran out of those supplies but we had marshmallows for the rest of the stretch and during the Sierra Nevada things like that were exciting we would have fires at night a lot of times just to try to you know get us motivated for the next day and it was kind of a relaxing day and the camaraderie of people sitting around the fire but beginning able to roast marshmallows was so much fun and they make a good lightweight snack also in the Sierra Nevada I really liked taking mio and you could just squirt it onto ice for slushies so it was just like a slushy snack if you want to do a more legitimate version you can do kool-aid with sugar and water and mix it up and make you know a syrup to pour but if you're just trying to do something quick that probably weighs less because you know making up a lot of syrup is kind of heavy but the concentrated mio just scored it on to a snowball is pretty good snack something that I found towards the end and I got really excited about was a candy bracelet I guess it's actually candy necklace but I put it on my wrist as a bracelet and just walk in and you know eatin eating the candy it was pretty good and you know it took me back to my childhood so those kind of fun I said I couldn't do peanut butter earlier but I can't do straight peanut butter or like peanut butter on a wrap but peanut butter crackers I can still do that and you know you can buy a big pack of them and they can be put in your hip belt pocket or an easy-to-reach place and something quick and good to snack on something else that I really loved were wasabi peas so those were good to just snack on or to throw and ramen noodles mashed potatoes pasta sides anything they were just you know a good snack and I mean their piece so they can't be that bad for you I also like to have cashews and almonds so Sandi's with the pecans and I love those baby food or just fruit squeeze packets they were a nice morale booster and then on shorter stretches so say I was only out for like three days so I'm not carrying you know five days of food I would tend to go heavier because I would think well I'm used to carrying five days worth of food and this time I'm only carrying three days worth so if I go with heavier food you know it'll kind of offset it so in those instances I like to carry out you know more healthy food so maybe apples bananas and especially avocados and if you're wondering you know how do you keep your fruit and vegetables like the spinach and stuff like that from not being crushed or bruised too much well I didn't put it in my food bag and carry it in the pack I would put the vegetables and the more fragile foods in the back of my pack so in the the big pocket on the outside I put it in there kind of tucked between my camp shoes which were my sandals to help pad it and then the pack and then I just be sure to be kind of careful when I threw down my pack not to throw it down you know on the back so it would smash that stuff I just kind of lean it up against something if you're wondering how some of these snack packages are easily accessible if they come in such a big container you can empty them down into smaller Ziploc bags and it also helps fit in your food bag that way and yes I know that does create more waste but you can reuse your Ziploc bags to help with that so I hope that gave you you know some ideas of maybe what backpackers eat if you've never been out backpacking before and you're looking into doing so those were my favorite things to eat on the Pacific Crest Trail there are probably more that I haven't even thought of right now but I just loved food towards the end it got a little harder because like I said after eating the same thing over and over you get kind of you know sick of it but that's why it's always important to mix it up and try new things and I know that a lot of people get concerned with calories and you know you're supposed to have two pounds per day of food and all of that but you'll learn what you need as long as you have some food you're not gonna starve to death in your first stretch and if you're going on a thru-hike it takes a little while for that hiker hunger to kick in but you'll know when it hits and it in my opinion it's better to have a little bit too much food than not enough because most of the time you can always pause food off on other hikers or you know make trade with the extra food that you have so I'm not gonna go into the details of you know you have to eat this many calories because I don't know I've never calculated that and I just make sure to have things that I do enjoy eating in my pack and if that means that your pack has to be a little bit heavier then go for it one last pointer that I'll give you which I learned from one of my friends on the Appalachian Trail but he said always eat your favorite thing in your pack because that way you're always eating your favorite thing I was like what's you know but it does really make sense if you think about it so you know some folks will tend to save like mac and cheese like oh I want to save this for you know the last night before town because it's so special and I love mac and cheese but like maybe that last night before town I won't even want that mac and cheese so I should have eaten it when I wanted it so when you open your food bag the thing that you want the most you might as well just go ahead and eat it because that way every time you open that food bag and you're eating something you're eating exactly what you want right then even if you know it's like slim pickins towards the end it's still the favorite thing that you want at that time if y'all don't mind I would love for you to comment what your favorite meals are or snacks while your own trail that way folks can go through and read them and maybe get some new ideas and you know help each other out because you know you just don't want to get sick of eating the same thing over and over and over so it's always great to hear what other folks are doing if you all would like to help support this channel at no additional cost to you the easiest way to do that is to go to Dixie AZ comm before you do your amazon shopping and you can just click there it'll redirect you and you can go through my affiliate links it doesn't cost you anything extra and it helps supports the work I do here and with that we will see y'all next time

Channel: Homemade Wanderlust

Views: 401,774

Rating: 4.9238095 out of 5

Keywords: travel, hiking, backpacking, hike, gear, adventure, fun, story, PCT, thru-hike, Auburn, Alabama, epic, Appalachian, Trail, climbing, canyon, national, nature, mountains, update, park, lake, trail, tents, camping, summer, University, Aubie, River, stream, Mountains, National, Scenic, food, paleo, snickers, Pecan Sandies, s'mores, Skittles, Pop Tart, Ramen, mushrooms, seaweed

Id: rg_1tB9eGJE

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 17 2017