Trail Cooking with Minimal Fuel

The lightest cooking fuel adds nothing to your pack weight - that is, if you don't mind gathering fire wood, making a cook fire, and tending to it while cooking your meal. But...if you're lazy like me, or you just hike until you're tired and hungry (OK that sounds more like me!), there's a good chance you prefer a simpler approach.

My backcountry cooking style is almost as simple as "set it and forget it", and I am still able to achieve an extremely lightweight kitchen. Freezer bag cooking (or FBC) is popular among backpackers because it's so easy. You simply carry your meal sized portions of dehydrated food inside quart freezer bags, pour boiling water right into the freezer bag, stir, seal, and insulate with a cozy. Then you wait for around 10 minutes and dinner is ready. But I have a way that is just as simple and uses a fraction of the fuel (not to mention the weight of all the freezer bags and the cozy!)...

Pour your dehydrated meal right into your cook pot. In this example, it's black bean soup, instant white rice, and some Delight Sauce. Add enough water to cover your meal by about half an inch, then set aside.

The lightest, most efficient fuel I've found is Esbit. I made my own titanium version of Trail Design's Gram Cracker Esbit stove. Their little 0.10oz stove is great, but since the Esbit fuel turns to liquid while burning, it runs down and fills the deep grooves with fuel which becomes solid when it cools. This creates additional work for you to scrape off the residue before you can disassemble and store the stove. My one piece design eliminates the grooves and almost never needs cleaning. I store it in a tiny MYOG cuben fiber sack to keep the dirty little stove away from everything else in my kitchen.

Esbit can be a little difficult to light, but there are tricks to making it easier. A few drops of denatured alcohol lights it very quickly, but if you're using Esbit, you're probably not carrying alcohol. I've even tried alcohol hand sanitizer, which works OK, but I don't tend to carry it either. My favorite method is to take my tiny pocket knife and scrape a small groove into the top of the cube at one end, creating a small pile of powder on the top. This Esbit powder ends up being relatively easy to light with your mini bic.

By now your meal has already begun rehydrating and it's time to get it cooking...

Bring it to just a boil, stir, cover, and blow out the flame. Let it stand for about 5 minutes to finish "cooking". As compared to bringing water to a rolling boil (for FBC cooking), this method takes about half the time, which of course uses less fuel.

After cooking a dinner for two, I typically end up with around half of my Esbit fuel cube left. My experience is we use less than one Esbit fuel cube (0.5oz) per day for two people, making a hot breakfast and dinner each day. This is about as close as you can get to carrying no fuel with the added bonus of not having to tend to a wood fire the entire time you are preparing your meal.

My Trail Designs 1.3 liter Sidewinder Ti-Tri stove leaves me the option to use it as a wood burning stove, which I have as a backup to Esbit. That way I don't need to carry any extra "just in case" fuel.

2 Hikers, 14 days, 70,764 calories

My son and I are about to head out on our thru-hike of the John Muir Trail, and our resupply boxes are almost ready to go. Rather than carrying 14 days of food with us, we will be mailing supplies to ourselves along the way.

It seems that backpacking sites tend to focus mostly on gear and trips (this one included). I don't think we see enough information on the very important topic of trail nutrition. You can make all the right gear choices to get your base weight down to "ultralight" status, then blow all the weight savings by carrying the wrong kinds of food. Pictured below is 14 days of backpacking food (7 days x 2 people).



My goals for our meal plan are...
#1 Well balanced nutrition, high energy for 10+ hours of walking per day.
#2 Simple meal preparation on the trail.
#3 Go as light as possible without going hungry.
#4 Use as little stove fuel as possible.

One special consideration for this trip is that our food has to fit inside a bear canister, as they are required in the area where we will be hiking. Of course I don't want to carry some gigantic (i.e. heavy) vessel to carry my food, so I leaned towards smaller, calorie dense types of foods such as couscous in lieu of pasta. Here is our menu...

JMT Meals	2527	calories per day
Breakfasts		Dinners
Sweet Couscous		Morroccan Delight
Rice Select Couscous		Couscous
Instant Nonfat Dry Milk		Delight Sauce with Hot Italian Sausage
Slivered Almonds		Spiced EVOO (12 fl oz in plastic bottle)
Dried Cranberries
		Beans & Rice
Hearty Oatmeal		Instant White Rice
100% Whole Grain Oats		Black Bean Soup
Instant Nonfat Dry Milk		Delight Sauce with Hot Italian Sausage
Slivered Almonds		Spiced EVOO (12 fl oz in plastic bottle)
Dried Cranberries
		Mashed Delight
Snack all day!		Idahoan mashed potatos
Lara Bar - cashew cookie		Delight Sauce with Hot Italian Sausage
Bora Bora - Island Brazil Nut		Spiced EVOO (12 fl oz in plastic bottle)
Clif Bar - Chocolate Chip
PayDay bar		Beverages
Snickers bar		Starbucks Via coffee
Wild Roots GORP		Truvia sweetener
Reggiano Parmesan cheese		Decaf Chamomile Tea
Hormel pepperoni snac pac		G2 Thirst Quencher packs
Mission flour tortillas - soft taco size
Fritos

Breakfast consists of nuts, berries, dry milk...half prepared with couscous, and for variety the other half with rolled oats. A favorite mid day snack is flour tortillas, pepperoni, and parmigiano reggiano cheese - kind of like a trail pizza!



My idea for dinners was to be able to mix a few ingredients to create several different meals, and have meal preparation take just a few minutes. Pictured below is 14 days of dinner...clockwise from top left, Delight Sauce, spiced olive oil (thanks for the great idea Mike Clelland!), black bean soup with instant white rice, couscous, and instant mashed potatoes (Idahoan Loaded Baked of course, everyone knows they're the best)...yum!



Will it all fit? There's some strategy to this. Bars across the bottom, then some granular food to fill in all the gaps. Note that the bags of food are under-stuffed in order to squeeze into any available spaces. More bars and flour tortillas fit nicely around the outside, and the rest goes in the middle.



It just fits, a weeks worth of food in this BearVault BV450 container, which is rated at 4 days capacity. Their larger size weighs a half pound more, and wouldn't fit inside my backpack.



Some snacks are purposely left out for the day (food only needs to be inside of the bear canister if you are going to be separated from it). I'll have to find room for that bottle of spiced olive oil before the day is done, which shouldn't be a problem after dinner.



Deatils details...yes I like them. My nutritional goals are to have lots of real food - nuts, whole grains, etc. I try to go with a balance of 50% carbohydrates, 35% fat, and 15% protein. The highest calories per ounce are from fat, but you need to try to maintain a decent balance. Don't worry if you don't hit your percentage goals dead on...they are just a target and a good way to see how different food choices affect your overall nutrition plan.

9.6	lbs	7	days in trip			7/12/2011
15.1	Cal/oz	1.37	lbs/day
Qty	Oz	Cal	Carb	Fat	Protein	Description
	153.69	17691	2229	782	555	Total Per Trip
	21.96	2527	318	112	79	Total Per Day
			50%	40%	13%	% of Carbs, Fat, Protein
7	12.95	1610	161	91	42	Lara Bar - cashew cookie
7	17.15	1680	308	35	70	Clif Bar - Chocolate Chip
3.5	6.65	840	95	46	25	PayDay bar
3.5	7.35	980	123	49	14	Snickers bar
9	12.96	1890	162	126	45	Wild Roots GORP
5	0.68	25	0	0	0	Starbucks Via coffee
5	0.65	0	15	0	0	Truvia sweetener
5	0.40	10	0	0	0	Decaf Chamomile Tea
7	4.05	280	70	0	0	G2 Thirst Quencher packs
1	0.65	0	0	0	0	Salt & Lemon Pepper (fishing)
1	5.50	880	88	55	11	Fritos
1	4.50	518	0	41	36	Reggiano Parmesan cheese
3	3.28	420	0	39	15	Hormel pepperoni snac pac
7	12.92	980	175	21	28	Mission flour tortillas - soft taco size
3.5	11.03	1120	177	35	39	Oatmeal/nuts/beries mix (see recipe - serves 1)
3.5	7.90	1120	191	26	35	Couscous/nuts/beries mix (see recipe - serves 1)
1.25	13.73	2098	172	106	116	Delight Sauce with Hot Italian Sausage
6	8.40	900	186	6	30	Couscous
2	8.00	880	160	20	16	Idahoan mashed potatos
2	3.80	320	72	0	8	Instant White Rice
1	4.65	420	76	2	26	Black Bean Soup
0.5	5.93	720	0	84	0	Spiced EVOO (12 fl oz in plastic bottle)
2	0.43	0	0	0	0	Ziploc Quart Freezer Bag
2	0.17	0	0	0	0	Plastic produce bag

For more detailed information on backpacking nutrition, check out this great article at Thru-Hiker written by a nutritionist. This is where I got my formulas for % of Carb, Fat, and Protein. They are obviously not perfect, as my totals add up to 103%.