Eating well in bear country

A lot of the advice about backpacking food that I've seen includes stuff like not using a lot of spices because the delicious smells attract bears. Which is true, unfortunately! Bears do love a good tasty meal. But, we've found a way to eat all sorts of delicious, savoury, spicy meals without attracting bears, and the key is to not need to do dishes.

Now, not doing dishes is kind of its own reward, but the reason this is important in bear country is because the food you've eaten isn't what attracts bears, that's inside your stomach... it's the food that was stuck to the inside of your pot and to your plate, which ends up in the wash water, which ends up dumped in the forest where the delicious smells of food linger. So we try to avoid wash water. Hiking stores sell those pre-packaged, "just add hot water" meals, but they're expensive, not very big, and there's a limited number of types. (Reviews also say some of them don't taste very good.) We make our own.

This post is not about recipes; this post is about principles. We recently did a 5 night hike, and had different delicious food for every meal, by using these principles.

Food cozies: inner cloth, mylar emergency blanket,
quilt batting, outer cloth.

The cooking method is "add hot water and wait" and cooking is done in a heavy duty freezer bag. Yes, they stand up to boiling water! The flimsy sandwich bags don't, but the heavy duty freezer bags do. We use the ~1 quart ("medium") size as they do a good job in holding one person's meal. Everything is pre-measured. If people in your group have very different food requirements, it helps to write their names on the bags. An insulated bag to put them in helps, both to protect your hands from burning, and in cooler weather, to keep your food hot. I made a couple of "food cozies" for our food, which are simple mylar-lined quilted bags.

Meal time involves boiling a pot of filtered water, putting the meal's freezer bag in the insulated bag, scooping some boiling water into the freezer bag, sealing it up, massaging the food periodically (and if it's a cold day, stuffing the food bag inside our jackets to warm us up and slow the food's heat loss) and adding more water if needed, until it's cooked. Cook time is often close to how long it takes to drink a thermal mug of hot chocolate, which is convenient. Then, we open the bags, eat with a spoon, seal up the empty dirty freezer bag, pack bags inside bags for our garbage which is kept in the bear cache with the food, lick the spoon really well, and put spoon in food cozy and both in the bear cache as well. Not only are there no dishes to wash, it's really fuel efficient by only needing to bring water to a boil - no boil time, no simmer time. (If you don't have a filter, you'll want to boil the water for a few minutes to purify it of course, as you do with your drinking water.)

So what kind of food can you cook using this method? Well, anything that has a boil time of under 5 minutes, or where the instructions literally are "add [to] hot water and wait." For backpacking we want dry, shelf-stable foods as well, of course.

So to put together a hot meal, we pick foods from the following categories:

A protein:

• pre-cooked meat: only for the first couple of days. I have used bacon bits or small pieces of bacon cooked crispy (especially in breakfasts), or chicken or pork sliced very small then cooked to brown.
• dried meat: jerky, dry pepperoni, landjaeger or other very dry sausage, broken into bite size pieces.
• freeze dried meat: expensive, but rehydrates into something with a texture most like fresh cooked.
• dry soy meat extender or protein powder. I prefer the one that's in little chunks, instead of protein powder, but either will work just fine for this purpose. 

Not a primary protein, but a good booster in addition to the above:

• whole egg powder: more of a specialty item, and might be harder to find. 
• whole milk or buttermilk powder.
• peanut butter powder: usually in the "health foods & supplements" section of the supermarket

A starch:

• minute rice
• couscous
• instant oatmeal
• ramen noodles
• instant mashed potatoes (the Idahoan pre-seasoned instant mashed potatoes are fantastic; the cheesy ones especially come with shelf-stable dry milk fat in them already.)
• small or thin pasta that has a cook time in the under 5 minute range should also work. 

A veggie:

• mixed dehydrated veggie bits from the grocery store bulk bins
• freeze-dried vegetables: rehydrates into something that looks and feels a bit fresher
• dried kelp: also rehydrates easily and holds its texture, so if you like that it's also a good vegetable addition.

A texture: one of the difficulties we encountered at first was, while the food was tasty, it was basically tasty mush. Adding in something chosen as much for texture as anything else turned out to be important.

• whole nuts
• mini dry shrimp
• dry anchovies
• kelp or jerky or sausage, from above lists

A spice mix: how do you want your meal seasoned? Have fun with this one. Explore your spice rack!

A thickener: potato starch. Unless you're using a potato base (which thickens itself up) or you want a soup, you'll probably want to thicken things up a little so the flavour sticks to the food. For this cooking method, potato starch is the best thickener we've found. It doesn't mess with the flavours, and you don't have to boil it to get it to thicken things.

A fat: in cold weather or for very long days, you'll probably be wanting some fat to help keep your furnace going to stay warm. A dab of a solid fat such as butter, lard, or coconut oil added to the meal with the hot water will help there. Choose your fat depending on the expected temperatures, and make sure your container won't leak if it liquefies. You can also bring a bottle of olive oil, but keep in mind that stuff has a tendency to creep everywhere, so pack to protect the rest of your stuff.

A garnish: who doesn't like a garnish?

• crispy fried onions
• freeze dried chives
• fresh green onion (for a first day meal)

A spice kit:

• salt and pepper. If you've been working (sweating) hard, you'll probably want to add salt to your meal. 
• tabasco sauce, because those little bottles may be glass, but they're tough, and it's a small luxury we like to have. 
• extra potato starch, in case one of the meals didn't get quite enough added to it.

We also leave fresh apples, oranges, or other reasonably long-lived fruit in a cooler in the car for the end of the hike. For a longer hike, like the 5-day one we did recently, we also brought a carrot each, just to have something fresh after a few days. If you leave them whole and with the skin on, they last quite a long time, and they aren't prone to bruising or squishing.

Still want a recipe? Ok fine, here's one:

Dry chicken (either cooked, jerky, or freeze dried)
Soy meat extender
Peanut butter powder
Buttermilk powder
Coconut milk powder
Shredded coconut
Plain ramen noodles
Mixed dehydrated veggies
Blanched salted peanuts
Cayenne
Coriander
Cumin
Red pepper flakes
Potato starch
Salt

Voila! a vaguely thai-ish peanut chicken noodley dish. Totally not actually thai, but peanutty, spicy, coconutty, filling, and tasty.