I'm making a bunch of FBC recipes for my upcoming trip. I have a question about freeze dried vegetables...should I order from someplace like http://www.justtomatoes.com/, or can I dehydrate my own and use that? How is the freeze drying different from dehydrating? Does it matter for FBC cooking? I have the FBC recipe book but it's not clear to me after reading it. Sometimes the recipes say freeze dried and other times just dried. I'm confused. ;-)

And if I do order them, I'm confused about how much to order. The online store has things in ounces, and the recipes call for cups.

Nojobro,

I'm going to follow this thread. What, specifically is FBC cooking and how is it different from re-hydrating your food in a pot of hot water?

I have a food dehydrator, I'd like to use as much 'home made' food for the BWCA as I can. I don't like to buy pre-processed, pre-dehydrated, pre-anything. I've heard of people dehydrating everything from spaghetti sauce to stews to ground beef(?). Can somebody break down a step by step process how to dehydrate these items safely (especially the beef)? It seems this could be dangerous if not done properly. I REALLY would like to eat a bit meaty spaghetti dinner at the campsite with a glass of red wine (bag wine, of course).

I also wonder, how is the freeze drying different from dehydrating?

Croixboy

Croixboy, FBC is basically re-hydrating your food in a pot of hot water, only you bring the food in a freezer bag, pour the water in, and let it sit inside a warm wrap of some sort. Check out

the Trail Cooking/FBC website

Also check out the dehydrating part of the above website here.

Oh and the key to dehydrating hamburger, I've heard (have not done it yet myself) is to use very lean meat. You can cook up the meat with onions or whatever spices you want, then do the tomato part separately (dehydrate it to a dry leather and then process in a blender) and then in camp, rehydrate them and warm them up. Voila, spaghetti sauce.

Food you dry yourself won't be as dry as commercially freeze-dried products, which means it will rehydrate more quickly. For our last trip, we did broccoli, carrots, onions, green pepper, and probably a couple other things I can't remember. Blanch the veggies in boiling water, drain, spread a thin, even layer on your dehydrator trays, and turn on the machine. Keep an eye on the stuff, because I've found things dry much more quickly than the booklet that came with the dryer said. You can also do this in an oven, but I don't know how.

To do beef, brown it until it is cooked through. As nojobro said, you can add whatever you like to the meat as it cooks. Drain off the juices and fat. You might even want to spread it on a couple layers of paper towels and then pat it with a couple more layers to dry it. (To get rid of more of the fat, I put mine in a colander and run hot water over it, then pat it dry.) Again, put a thin, even layer on your dryer trays, turn on the machine, and keep an eye on it.

You don't need to put the dehydrated tomato sauce in a blender. We had home-dried spaghetti sauce on our June trip. We just tore the "tomato leather" into chunks, so it fit in the pan, added the beef, poured boiling water over the whole thing, waited ten minutes, and added the cooked spaghetti. Not long after we got back, though, I ran across this additional suggestion (probably on this site), which I plan to try on my next trip:

We cook our pasta at home, and sauce, then mix them together, then dehydrate. Now it's a one pot meal at camp. No need to strain any noodles and then top them with rehydrated sauce. Plus they cook faster. Just cover your dehydrated pasta/sauce dinner with about 1/2 inch of water, boil, set to the side and let soak for 10 minutes, and enjoy.

Found a little info at www.howstuffworks.com:

Freeze-drying is a special form of drying that removes all moisture and tends to have less of an effect on a food's taste than normal dehydration does.

In freeze-drying, food is frozen and placed in a strong vacuum. The water in the food then sublimates -- that is, it turns straight from ice into vapor.

You'll find lots of dehydrating info right on this board. The search function is valuable.

However, I'd also highly recommend purchasing a good trail cooking book. Several excellent authors frequently participate on this board.

For veggies, I've found that frozen bagged veggies work well for a lazy cook. They have been cleaned and blanched at a fair price. I even do corn that way, though others prefer freeze dried corn.

Good luck. You are entering a fascinating area.

Hey Buffy,
Do you dehydrate the hamburger with the sauce or separately? Just wondering if it would rehydrate in the same amount of time.

Brooklynn07

Either way (separate or combined), it will take about ten minutes if you use boiling water.

We wrote up a little explanation on freeze-dried v dehydrated here:

Freeze Dried v Dehydrated

That answers all of the questions we could think of about the differences between the two :)

Some of the big differences though are that freeze-dried foods rehydrate almost instantly while dehydrated food can take a little longer - you can even eat freeze-dried foods without rehydrating them! They'll be a little bit crunchy but nothing like dehydrated. Also, freeze-dried foods are a bit more lightweight than dehydrated but they also retain more of their shape making them more bulky.