hey everyone, it's alex haney here and i amenjoying a delicious home cooked meal out in the ganaraska wilderness. in this videoi'm going to show you how i prepare and dehydrate my meals for eating in the backcountry. heyguys it's alex haney here in my tiny kitchen in the city and i'm about to whip up a bigbatch of chilli to dehydrate and take camping with me. so i just though i would take youguys along on the entire process of what i
easy foods you can freeze, do to cook, dehydrate and then prepare mymeals out in the bush. so like i said i'm about to make some chilli, i'm making a vegetarianchilli but you could just as easily add meat. here's all my ingredients all ready to go.i'm a huge fan of making things like chilli or other one pot meals. i may a lot of, aton of soups for the backcountry. those are
my preference because they really requireno preparation in the field, you just have to rehydrate them and eat them and they'reall ready to go. so basically your first step is just going to be to prepare your meal asyou would usually do and what i really like doing is to just make a huge batch of a mealand then i'll eat part of it for dinner and then dehydrate the rest. okay so you're prettymuch going to make the recipe as you usually would, except there's one little thing thatsgoing to help you a bit later when you're dehydrating which is you want to cut the vegetablesmuch smaller and finer than you usually would. especially when you're making things likestews, there's this stew that i make and uh they usually tell you to make big chunks ofstuff for those and uh they just don't dehydrate
very well and then everything else will bedone but those big chunks won't be. okay so our chilli is all done now and what we'regonna do is just take it and dehydrate it now. so what i use is this dehydrator here.if you don't have a dehydrator... what i used to do before i had a dehydrator is just putit in the oven and put it on the lowest temperature. and its not as efficient and it takes longer,you can't do as much stuff at once but it does work, so you can definitely get starteddoing that. if you are using a dehydrator, you're gonna have these, these sort of traysand uh if you're doing like a soup or chilli like i am, you're going to need this kindof attachment, its like pure plastic bottom for the trays. so basically its going to looklike this. so basically what you're going
to do is just scoop your chilli or soup orwhatever into the tray and spread it out. don't make it too thick or anything like that.and um, if you have a soup thats really watery, you can strain out some of the liquid. whati always do when i make a soup is make it thicker than i normally would, or let it reducedown until a lot of the liquid is gone. if its like a soup that asks for broth, and youdon't want to waste all of that broth then um what you can do is just cook it with wateror you know part broth part water and then what i've done before is brought those boullioncubes out into the backcountry so that when i'm rehydrating and i want it to be kind ofbrothy, then i'll just add one of those little boullion cubes. so yeah you're just gonnakeep adding layers here and fill up your dehydrator
until its full. if you're using the oven thenyou just use a cookie sheet and you can do like two layers in your oven. okay so i'vegot my fourth layer all done here and now i'm just going to throw the lid onto my dehydrator.you want to make sure its on the right setting. so for veggies and fruit and stuff like thatits a lower temperature than for meat, um but if you're using the oven then its justgoing to be pretty much as low as you can go. mine i put on 150 degrees celsius. soonce thats set you can go ahead and plug in your dehydrator, turn it on and you're goingto leave that for quite a long time, i'd say this is going to take at least eight hours.so if you want you can check in every couple hours to see how its doing but uh don't betoo impatient because it takes a while. okay
guys so it is twelve hours later, i left thechilli dehydrating overnight and lets take a look at what it looks like. as you can seeit has shrunk up quite a bit and the way that you can tell its done, you're gonna want towash your hands and just sift through it and feel for any squishy bits. everything shouldfeel really hard and brittle. yeah like i said, nothing squishy. i actually had to,i thought this was done but then realized that some of the peppers weren't completelydehydrated so i had to leave it on for an extra hour or two. so once you know its dried,um what i like to do with it is, i've got these little ziploc freezer bags and justlabel it with what it is and the date that i made it and then you're just going to putit in your freezer. okay so here is the end
result, i've got two sort of medium freezerbags full of the chilli. you're just gonna throw that in the freezer until you're readyto go on your trip. and in light of my previous video, i though it would be suitable to bringmy favourite apron. yes, walter white! tonight i'm just having a dehydrated winter stew thati made. basically what we're gonna do is first we're going to boil some water in our cookkit and then we're gonna put it in an insulated type of cozy. what i used to do before i foundout about making these with um reflectix is uh i just brought a little thermos, whichis a method that i learned from one of my friends but its really not good for backpackingbecause you're carrying extra stuff... for a canoe trip its fine. i learned how to makethis cozy from shug. i'll link that video
right here actually so you can go and seehow to make this. get your stove going. whatever stove you want to use is fine. light that.okay. put the wind screen on. and then we will throw some water in our cooking pot.and again, its kind of guess work but thats the good thing about soups and stews likei said. so we'll just wait for that to boil. alright so we got that boiling now, what we'regonna do is take it off and throw it in the pot cozy. give it a stir. throw the lid backon there. cover it up and now you're going to leave it like that for about fifteen minutesi'd say. alright so its about fifteen minutes later and lets take a look at our meal. asyou can see, it is nice and hydrated in there. i added some olive oil because like i said,i like to add stuff to my meals. just adds
a bit more flavour and calories. mmm. mmm.if you guys aren't able to do this method then another option that i sometimes do isi will just cook it over my stove but before throwing it on your stove what i would dois just soak it for about twenty minutes, thirty minutes, even an hour if you have thetime. and then just um cook it over your stove or camp fire and try to simmer it if yourstove has that, that definitely helps. if you're putting it on the fire just put itout of the direct flame. these cozies, if you don't want to make one, um they do sellthem at places like mec or rei i believe. another option if you're going on a canoetrip or weight isn't that much of an issue for you, again you can use like a thermos.mmm. basically the more slowly you can rehydrate,
the more successfully it will rehydrate. ifyou try to you know just blast it over high heat in five minutes then its gonna be hardand disgusting. i hope you guys really liked this video, if you did give it a thumbs up,don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this. see you guys later.
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