How to Make Homemade Dehydrated Camping Meals
Reading Time: 7 minutes Dehydrated camping meals are one of the most easy-to-serve meals that save you time and effort during camping time. Although all the food on camping trips tastes delicious due to the family cooperation in preparing the food, you can also enjoy many wonderful and delicious flavours at times Camping with dried food.
You can dry many foods if you do not want to use ready-made dried foods in the market, and home-dried foods are better than commercial ones. Also, you can choose what you want to dry and add some ingredients and spices that you want. Home-dried foods are safer than ready-made ones.
If you camp in an RV, you can make quick meals out of these dried foods. There are days when you tour the surrounding areas. It will take a lot of your time preferably using dried foods that you can cook in just a few minutes.
WHAT YOU CAN AND CANNOT DRY
You must know what foods you can dry safely, there are many foods that you can dry effortlessly and will last for long periods, but there are also many foods that you should avoid because they spoil quickly. For example, you should avoid foods that contain large amounts of Fats such as meat, sausage, butter even cheese are the same.
But there are also many foods that you can preserve for extended periods. For example, you can dry many vegetables and fruits that you can later use to make incredible meals and soups.
For better drying, you must cook the meat and most of the vegetables that you want to dry first, and after you get a variety of dried vegetables, you can collect them in bags for preparation when needed in the camp.
Food Prep: The Key to Dehydrating
You should know this well. When drying food, food shrinks because it loses the water in it so, you have to take into account the quantities that you dry.
For example, a pound of apples produces about a cup and a half of dried apples, and you also have to pay attention when cutting foods. You have to cut them large in order not to melt them during drying.
Storing Dehydrated Food
There are many different ways of preserving food, but what distinguishes drying food is who has the most extended life. This secret is due to the removal of moisture in foods that prevents food oxidation, which is the secret to extending the life of your dried food.
Dried fruits can last up to 5 years if foods are kept properly. Also, dried vegetables can last for longer than five years.
After working to dry food, all you have to use is freezer bags or re-compression storage bags on food for a more prolonged period, and you can use an oxygen absorber for better preservation.
You can also store meat and seafood in freezer bags. Properly, dried meat can last for a year, but you must pay attention to the smells of foods, you must ensure the validity of the food used, especially if you want to go on a camping trip, check it well to enjoy your trip.
Now we will learn how to dry some foods that you can take on camping trips that will delight the whole family gathered around the campfire:
Dehydrate Fruit
In this paragraph, we will learn how to dry fruits. You can dry the fruit in several ways, such as cutting it into slices or mixed with some oats or granola and drying the fruits with their skin, and the fruit, whether chopped or hybrid, must be dried at a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
We will present you with the recipe for apples with dried cinnamon.
How to Dehydrate Fruit:
- Cut the apples into quarters using a knife. You can halve the pieces if you find that they are too large.
- Put the apples in a bowl or plastic bag and add a teaspoon of lemon juice to the cut apples.
- Add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the apples, and you can add a teaspoon of sugar if you find the apples sour.
- Stir the bag well.
- Place the sliced ​​apples on trays and dry them at 140°F for 8-12 hours until pliable.
Dehydrate Vegetables
In order to dry vegetables, you must steam these vegetables to get better drying and make re-hydrating them much more comfortable.
In order to save time, you can use frozen vegetables, but you should beware of canned vegetables. WE cannot dry these vegetables because they are saturated with water.
Most vegetables can be dried at 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and vegetables with high levels of moisture can be dried at 140 degrees.
We will make a recipe for drying mixed vegetables:
How to Dehydrate Vegetables
- We bring several frozen vegetables.
- We dry vegetables at 130 degrees for 6-8 hours.
- Each pound of vegetables yields about a cup of dried vegetables.
How to Dehydrate Meat and Seafood
Preserving meat and seafood is harder than drying fruits and vegetables, as this meat must be heated to kill bacteria that can infect the flesh.
For this process to be successful, you must use lean meat because the fats and oils in the flesh can spoil it.
Meat should be dried at up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit until the meat is firm and completely dry.
drying ground beef:
For the success of drying the beef, you should choose lean or low-fat meat, and you can add some breadcrumbs, which works to help absorb moisture. You can add a cup of breadcrumbs to a pound of beef.
How to drying ground beef:
- Put the minced meat in a bowl and then add the breadcrumbs.
- Add salt and pepper as desired.
- Mix the mixture with your hand so that the breadcrumbs are evenly distributed
- Put the meat in a frying pan over medium heat until the meat is brown and cooked enough
- Lay the beef out on paper towels, wiping off the excess fat from the meat
- Place the meat after drying well on the non-stick paper to prevent losing parts of the meat
- Dry the meat at 150 degrees for 6 hours until the meat is dark in colour.
Chicken drying :
Before starting drying chicken or white meat, you must cook this meat by pressing, or you can use canned chicken after filtering it from the water. White meat is better than red meat in terms of drying because of the low-fat content in white meat.
- Bring trays with the addition of non-stick paper on the surface of the trays.
- Spread the shredded chicken evenly on the tray.
- Wipe off any fat on the chicken.
- Dry the chicken at 150 degrees for 7-8 hours
WARM AND FILLING DEHYDRATED SOUPS
After learning how to dry some great foods, we can now make these dried vegetables, fruits, and meats on our camping trip.
We can make some delicious soups at night. Sitting around a campfire, imagine you’re enjoying chicken soup full of great-tasting dried vegetables.
All you have to do is use fat-free chicken broth and use the mixed vegetables we’ve dried with some dried chicken.
Put this mixture on the campfire with the addition of the dried chicken. For heating the soup, use two tablespoons of starch or flour to make the soup better tasting, cook for several minutes and then pour it into the campers plates and enjoy the beautiful stories with this dish.
VEGETARIAN DEHYDRATED MEALS
There are many vegetables that we have explained how to dry them? You can dry quinoa beans in the same way as drying vegetables.
Quinoa is one of the special meals, as it gives a dose of proteins, and to make the best quinoa recipe, you can do this
way, which is the most popular at all on camping trips.
Add equal amounts of quinoa, lentils and your dehydrated vegetables to a cup of boiling water, and wait a bit to get the best out of this delicious and nutritious quinoa soup.
DELICIOUS DEHYDRATED DESSERTS
Of course, we can not forget the sweets on camping night and when sitting around the fire. We like to eat some sweets.
We can make use of the apples that we have dried in advance. You can follow the method above to get the best-dried apples with cinnamon.
And you can make this easy recipe, which is one of the best desserts you can ever taste.
For each person, you can mix a cup of apple slices that we have dried previously with some sugar and half a spoon of cinnamon in a storage bag, and then put ¾ cup of boiling water for apples and leave for a while 10 minutes to moisten the apples, and then eat this meal while it is warm.
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