Food planning for long trips

[CPS]

Some interesting thoughts to consider for planning out meals for trips. A YouTuber who goes by Gear Skeptic has compiled a pretty massive list of different foods and their caloric values. It's geared towards optimizing nutrition for lightweight backpacking, but applicable to anyone trying to bring more calories into a smaller package.

Excel Version:

Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

PDF Version:

Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

I don't generally bring too much pre-prepared meals with me but it's helpful to have an at a glance reference for what commonly available items have a higher caloric density, particularly in regards to the volume they take up.
As kayakers we're not worried about weight as much as space, so denser foods can help pack stuff.

From another thread:

I made my own dehydrated meals. I've got some dietary restrictions (some by choice, some by fate) so I like having control over ingredients.

Generally every day I would have a few Hornby Bars while paddling in the morning to start things off. I'm not a big fan of breakfast so I that worked for me. It also saves cleaning dishes.
On short trips or when paddling in a group I will sometimes eat oatmeal with all sorts of goodies added, but usually when solo I prefer to just get up and go.

Lunches would be a dehydrated meal put in the thermos with hot water before launching. Whenever I would want to have lunch the meal would be perfectly rehydrated. The thermos has a folding spoon that fits into the lid, so I could just pull over somewhere sheltered and eat without getting out of the kayak. Typically I would rinse out the thermos at sea.

Dinners followed the same protocol. Fill the thermos and do something else while waiting for food to rehydrate. It would take about 20 minutes for the meal to rehydrate well, so I would use that time to filter water, journal, etc.

Because dehydrated meals have to be low in fat when dried to prevent spoilage, I would supplement the fat and caloric content by adding either coconut oil, peanut butter, or both as appropriate to the meal. I prefer coconut oil as it's solid and less likely to make a mess than olive oil or other liquid meals. I also brought along a coconut milk powder which could be added to meals like curries to round out the flavour. In future I might add some to the dried meals before sealing them just to simplify things.

Main reasons for dehydrating my own meals are PRICE, control of ingredients, and control of portion size.

Assuming 0 moisture, a gram of carbohydrate and protein will both have the same weight. I usually aim to have meals of about 200-300 grams dry weight, with about 50 grams coming from the protein source.

For protein I have used ground beef and chicken, boiled and with the fats rinsed away. It's pretty tasteless, but will dry to be very easy to rehydrate.
Alternatively, and more commonly now, I am just opting for textured soy protein, soy curls, or dried tofu. Generally less expensive and easier to deal with.
There are two general ideals regarding dehydrated meals: drying the seperate components and assembling them, or drying the entire meal.
Pros and cons to either method, but usually I'll just dry the entire meal minus protein, and add it to the dried meals at packaging.

I find this website to be very helpful when just getting started:

Guide to Dehydrating Food | Backpacking Chef

Step-by-step instructions for dehydrating food. Explore how to dehydrate vegetables, fruits, meats, starches, sauces, and whole meals.

www.backpackingchef.com

There are lots of different ways to store dehydrated meals. For trips coming up within a few months I usually just toss them in a ziplock and store them in the freezer. A cupboard would probably do just as well but I usually have room in the freezer.
For longer storage when I'm making meals for long trips or trips well in the future I will seal them with a vacuum sealer with an oxygen absorber enclosed. I like to fold a paper towel on the bag and put most of the dried food within the sheet. It helps to prevent the bags from being punctured by pointy food when vacuum sealing.

 

[JohnAbercrombie]

Excellent tips; thanks. A paddling buddy who is a more experienced tripper pointed out to me that vacuum sealed meals are much 'harder' and difficult to pack into smaller volumes - i.e. they don't 'share the space' very well. So, for trips of just a week or two, with food made not far in advance, loose packing in plastic bags works better. This is especially true if packing food into bear barrels.

The paper towel in the bag is a good idea - helps with spill cleanup and wiping my face, too.

I've used a lot of recipes from 'Backpacking Chef' which are mostly the 'boil and rest in an insulated pot' style. I laser print on a slip of paper the name of the meal (they all look similar in the bags) and basic timing instructions, and include that in the bag. When I'm tired, it helps to avoid mistakes : "Brain not needed' just follow instructions!"

 

[CPS]

Yes, the vauum sealed bricks are tough to pack. My old sealer had the ability to only do a partial vacuum, which I think is the sweatspot. A small enough amount of air that the oxygen absorber can handle the remainder, but not so small as to be inflexible.

If the bricks don't fit, poking a needle hole in them would be a good solution. Then you get the long term at home storage and even with a pinhole those meals would be fine for weeks. Unless you're submerging them for some reason...

 

[ELS]

I dry a lot of meals for our kayaking and backpacking trips. Mostly, I season, cook, and dehydrate the carbs (e.g., saffron and rice cooked in a rice cooker or stovetop risotto cooked with wine and chicken broth), then combine them with dried veggies (I’ve used sliced zucchini, sliced yellow squash, par-boiled diced winter squash or carrots, sliced bell peppers; store-bought dried tomatoes, store-bought dried mushrooms, freeze-dried (FD) sweet corn and FD peas). Sometimes I substitute quinoa for the rice. Two servings of carbs and veggies is combined in a zip-seal bag, which packs easily into a bear can. For each meal, we carry 25g/serving of FD chicken (bought in 10-gallon cans from a survivalist outfit or from Mountainhouse and repacked in vacuum-sealed bags as 50g per two-serving meal). In camp, we mix carbs/veggies and FD chicken in a cook-pot, rehydrate with cold water for 10 minutes, bring to a boil on JetBoil MightyMo stove, then put the pot in a cozy (a mylar insulated bag, recycled from COVID shut-down food deliveries) for 15 minutes. Serve in separate bowls, with 1 tbsp of olive oil per serving. I’ve done a lot of modifying, but the original recipe ideas came from https://www.freshoffthegrid.com/recipes/dehydrating/

We haven’t tried rehydrating it all in wide-mouth thermoses, but it might work.

 

[CPS]

You might be interested in experimenting with pressure cooked chicken breast. Once well shredded I found it rehydrated well. Generally if you cook the life out of a meat protein, it'll rehydrate fine without trouble.
It works out to be significantly cheaper than FD cans. Usually after shredding I would mix it in a bowl with various seasoning before dehydrating to zhuzh it up a bit.

I've also had good results with canned tuna and chicken. It's basically the same idea, as they're pressure cooked in the cans.
Canned foods and the associated water within them can be a good option on shorter trips but I find the bulk they take up, and the challenge of carrying around the empty cans, to be more hassle than I want to deal with.

 

[SWriverstone]

Y'all are way too healthy! LOL I think i mentioned it elsewhere...but long-distance hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail (and other long trails) are famous for going for whatever has the highest calorie count per ounce, period. Completely regardless of its health value.

Snickers bars are a top food item...along with instant Ramen (nothing fancy—Maruchan or Top Ramen), Idahoan mashed potatoes with Fritos corn chips added to them...potato chips (for the first day or two after a resupply)...Cream of Wheat and prepackaged oatmeal...Gummi bears...you get the picture. With a plastic bottle of olive oil to drizzle on everything (including the Snickers bars) for added calories.

Then of course during resupply stops in towns, they all eat 4-5 cheeseburgers, 1-2 large pizzas, 40 pancakes and 2 dozen eggs, etc.

But then PCT hikers are often limited for food to what they can find in a convenience store in a small rural town...and they also typically burn about 5,000 calories per day, so...

 

[ELS]

Caloric density, i.e., calories per unit weight, is important for kayakers and backpackers alike. Removing water (i.e., dehydrating) is the most important way to increase energy density of a food.

According to wikipedia, in general, proteins have lower energy densities (≈16 kJ/g) than carbohydrates (≈17 kJ/g), whereas fats provide much higher energy densities (≈38 kJ/g), i.e., 2+1⁄4 times as much energy as proteins and carbs. This translates to ca. 9 calories per gram of fat vs. 4 calories per gram of protein or carbohydrates.

Also according to wikipedia, foods with high energy density have more than three calories per gram (>13 kJ/g) and include [greasy] crackers, cheese, chocolate, nuts, and fried foods like potato or tortilla chips.

Polar paddlers, who need massive caloric intake to counteract the cold, almost always report supplementing all meals with pure fat: butter, coconut oil, or olive oil seem to be favorites. Last year we encountered a solo backpacker on a 15-day trip in the Sierra who was carrying almost nothing to eat except already cooked bacon (he was carrying neither stove nor fuel and camping mostly above 10,000 feet, where campfires are forbidden and, in any case, there is little available to burn).

 

[SWriverstone]

Yep—PCT thru-hikers typically carry a bottle of olive oil to add to other foods. Having done both week-long backpacks and week-long paddles, I'd say that while the caloric needs of kayak trippers (not in polar regions) is likely high...it's not as high as backpacking in the mountains. For one, backpacking a mountain trail requires a lot of climbing (with 35lbs on your back). That's seriously aerobic activity (often becoming anaerobic), where even a fit hiker will run a heartrate of 160-170bpm for an hour during the climb. I've found if I paddle my sea kayak at a full-on sprint, I can get my HR up to 165 or so...but that's only at a full sprint. If I'm just paddling at an average touring pace (say 4mph) my HR is typically down in the 120-130 range. Though we'd like to think so, kayaking just isn't as hard as hauling 35lbs on your back up steep mountains (unless you're paddling like an orca is trying to devour you from behind the whole time).

Interestingly, you'd think that someone completing a PCT thru-hike (2,650 miles or 4,264km) would be in phenomenal condition...some studies were done by U. Washington researchers on thru-hikers, and what they found was that the hikers were often in worse health at the end of a long hike than when they started. They attributed this largely to the foods the hikers ate for 5 months on the trail (interspersed with gorging on burgers and pizza in towns)...as well as the sheer abuse a hike like that places on their bodies. (And losing toenails, having inflamed joints, knee issues, back problems, and all sorts of other "body abuse" related issues are very common.)

Honestly, long-distance kayaking seems pretty cushy by comparison. (Some of our IP paddlers could probably confirm or deny this?)

 

[CPS]

On my IP trip I was eating 2 dehydrated meals per day, each with a minimal weight of about 250 grams dry. Assuming all that content is carbohydrate and protein that's 2000 calories.

Added to each meal was a big scoop of coconut oil, say 1.5 tbsp. Thats about 170 extra calories per meal, bringing it to about 2340 calories for those two meals.

I would have several Hornby Organic snack bars throughout the day, each about 350 calories. Assuming 3 as a daily average, that's another 1050 calories. I chose them specifically for nutrient density while also being tasty.

That puts my total at about 3400 calories per day, based off my smallest meals. Some were larger but not by much. I generally aim to include 50 grams of protein source per meal, though if a meal used dried tofu, for instance, the total protein would be a bit less as I just add 50 grams of that.

The bars would give me about 30 grams of protein, so my daily totals were probably about 100-150 grams of protein.

Over the course of 2200 kilometers of paddling I lost about 4 pounds. Assuming that's all fat at 3500 calories per pound, that means I was short by 14000 calories. Over 72 days of paddling including rest days, that means I was short each day by just about 200 calories.

A handful of nuts, another bar, or in PCT terms, a Snickers, per day would have meant that I gained weight over the trip. Or put another way, would have switched it from a net caloric deficit to a net caloric surplus. Considering that I just ate as I was hungry and still had many meals left over at the end, I think my caloric requirement estimate was pretty spot on for my needs.

I would say hiking and paddling are roughly equivalent caloric expenditures on level ground. As kayakers we are fortunate that we don't find ourselves paddling uphill all that much.
I base that assertion on lots of experience with both long distance paddling and hiking.

Hiking on flat terrain for 12 hours feels about the same as paddling in calm conditions for 12 hours. Obviously different muscles are used but metabolically neither stands out as being much harder relatively.
But hike up a mountain or paddle all day against a headwind and the math gets tougher.

My attitude towards food is to bring lots of nutrient rich foods in the form of dehydrated meals high in veggies. Supplement the calories with fats. If you want to bring "junk" food along as well, there's probably no harm done. I'm lactose intolerant so the modified milk ingredients in a lot of ultra processed food doesn't work with me. But if eating a pound of milk chocolate covered almonds per day is works for you, more power to you.

 

[cougarmeat]

Though sometimes the terms "dehydrated" and "freeze-dried" are used interchangeably, they are definitely not the same.

I once bought a sample pack of various dehydrated veggies, including green peas. I assumed they'd be like the wonderful Mountain House Freeze Dried green peas that were sold as a separate item in yesteryear. Now, those peas are only included in other compositions.

The dehydrated peas took forever, and then some, to soften up. I'd soak them overnight and day; they were still hard. If they were cooked in boiling water for longer than any other item on the menu, they'd approach edibility.

The lesson learned was, "Try it at home first."

 

[CPS]

The dehydrated peas took forever, and then some, to soften up. I'd soak them overnight and day; they were still hard. If they were cooked in boiling water for longer than any other item on the menu, they'd approach edibility.

For legumes I suggest buying dry from the regular grocery store, pressure cooking until soft, then dehydrate at home. They'll be a bit uglier, but will rehydrate MUCH faster. Especially for thick skinned beans like red kidney beans.
I bought a big bag of split yellow mung beans which I made into a curry for my trip. They are a tiny little bean, so they rehydrate super well. Great protein content and, cheap, cheap, cheap.

 

[SWriverstone]

I’m a huge fan of dehydrated refried beans—they’re great!

One of (IMO) the most dubious trends in ultralight hiking is to go stoveless. These folks will add a dehydrated meal and water to a screw-top container during the day and let it hydrate til dinner. Then at camp they’ll just open the container, give it a stir, and slurp it all down stone-cold.

I think that’s crazy, and there’s no way I’d do without hot coffee, tea, or hot chocolate on an extended trip. Maybe in a hot desert it could work…

 

[Mowog73]

For me, part of the fun and joy of long paddling trips is looking forward to good food at the end of the day. A cold, dehydrated meal sounds terrible, an awful way to end the day.

I like to bring clarified butter/ghee with me. A spoonful added to instant mashed potatoes sure improves the taste!

 

[Kayak Jim]

If you're having to carry water anyway, what's the benefit of having dehydrated meals? Packing efficiency I suppose? Or if you have a water source enroute you can bring the water to a boil rather than running through treatment. Seems to be minimal advantage since you're carrying the filtration anyway.

 

[CPS]

Longer shelf life so it can be prepped well in advance of the trip, lighter weight when carrying food up and down the beach.

If you're paddling somewhere where you can't resupply water en route then it doesn't make as much sense.

 

[JohnAbercrombie]

The lesson learned was, "Try it at home first."

I think it's a good idea to try eating that kayak trip menu - all of it- at home.
Switching to a menu with gobs of straight fats, energy bars, etc. can lead to an 'upset tummy' to use the genteel term.
I learned that my body didn't tolerate chocolate well, when on a kayak trip. 'Special treat' chocolate as a reward at the end of a long day didn't work for me, and it was something I hardly ever ate at home.

 

[chodups]

I think it's a good idea to try eating that kayak trip menu - all of it- at home.
Switching to a menu with gobs of straight fats, energy bars, etc. can lead to an 'upset tummy' to use the genteel term.
I learned that my body didn't tolerate chocolate well, when on a kayak trip. 'Special treat' chocolate as a reward at the end of a long day didn't work for me, and it was something I hardly ever ate at home.

Good advice, however, I've found that the trip food tastes lots better in camp then in the kitchen.

 

[SWriverstone]

It’s really common in backpacking for meals that taste good at home to be awful on the trail. I did a 7-day backpack in the Sierra Nevada last year and hated half the meals I brought with me after hiking 15 miles above 10,000 feet on a typical day. The only meal I liked was dehydrated refried beans, Minute brown rice and tortillas…and I ate all of that in the first 3 days, then had to choke down the other stuff. (I should have “stress tested” my meals better!)

 

[JohnAbercrombie]

The only meal I liked

The other day I was watching a YT video of a Q&A session with Steve House, a climber who has done a lot of high-altitude climbing. One question referred to losing appetite at high altitude. His answer "You have to eat; it doesn't matter if you are hungry or not. If you can't do that, you'll never climb a high-altitude peak."
Pretty 'hard core" !
However, thinking about 'fuel' instead of 'food' has been necessary for me on a few occasions, even 'in the lap of luxury' with all the cooking gear and food I could pack into my kayak.
https://uphillathlete.com/nutrition/

 

[SWriverstone]

Some of the simplest things make the best fuel—among them, peanut butter and maple syrup. Several years ago I started carrying a Coghlans' plastic squeeze tube filled with peanut butter (JIF is the highest-calorie!) and a small bottle of maple syrup on long XC ski trips. They both work great! Every half-hour or so I'll just squeeze a "slug" or two of peanut butter into my mouth, and wash it down with a couple swigs of maple syrup. The syrup is a completely natural fuel source that's lower on the glycemic index and has some good minerals (it's lately been popular with competitive cyclists). I'm sure they'd be good for paddling too. And of course the peanut butter has plenty of calories and protein.