Hello
Bimber,
My wife and I have been dehydrating our camping meals for canoe-tripping and backpacking for years now. It's fun and easy.
Below are a couple of instructional videos we made specifically for those who want to dehydrate meals for camping and they should answer some of your questions and remove a lot of the guesswork.
With respect to your specific questions:
Pasta and chili sauces will last for weeks and weeks in the field if properly dehydrated and kept dry. Provided you vacuum seal your bags or use Ziplock bags with the air squeezed out of them, your meals will be fine. They won't spoil unless moisture gets
into the individual bags.
The other consideration, mentioned by others already, is reducing fat content. Fats eventually go rancid. It usually takes weeks before this happens and, while it won't harm you, it can spoil the taste of an otherwise delicious meal.
With respect to refrigeration, we dehydrate our meals and ingredients for the whole year in the early spring, put them in Ziplock bags, and toss them into the freezer. If you leave them longer than a year, some foods will take on a slightly freezer-burned taste. The refrigeration just permits you to store your foods longer without fear that moisture will get in or that whatever moisture has gotten in will cause spoilage.
The temperature of your food barrel doesn't matter. What matters is moisture content. If there's no moisture in your individual dehydrated meal bags, then the food won't absorb it and won't spoil. Our food barrel routinely hangs in full sun all day long and it's never been a problem.
Regarding sauces containing milk or cream, I wouldn't want to dehydrate sauces that have a lot of it, as the fat content will be too great and this means that it doesn't become as light or small, and the more fat there is, the more rancid tasting it can get. But we have even dehydrated cottage cheese as an ingredient for breakfast wraps. Just remember that fats don't dehydrate and will go rancid after some weeks, so keep those meals in the freezer until you pack your barrel.
Here are the links to our dehydrating vids:
http://youtu.be/hu1-9DkmUKIhttp://youtu.be/J3iYj025fcgHope this helps,
- Martin
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No one has ever been heard to say on a deathbed "I wish I'd put in more time at the office."
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