Is it possible to use a home dehydrator to dry soups such as Progresso? I’m talking about the chunky stuff, ready to eat, with large pieces of veggies and/or meat.
Has anyone done this, and if so what were the results?
Jim
why would you?
It sounds like a bad idea, the veggies are already so soggy they’d turn to dust, and for the same trouble you can just buy dehydrated veggies and make soup out of them with no added effort.
why not take beef bouillon
already dehydrated soup in the supermarket like Knoerrs Veggie soup and some dehydrated beef?
For dehydration to be efficient all the pieces have to be small and equal size.
you could check with Tamia …
– Last Updated: Apr-15-10 9:20 PM EST –
..... and see how she made out with dehydrating her soups .
http://www.paddling.net/sameboat/archives/sameboat441.html
Just click on her email link at top of article , it will reference the article you are responding to .
I’d advise against it
Small pieces are best when it comes to dehydrating. So if the soup has big chunks, especially meat, I’d say no. For meats, you want to dehydrate lower fat cuts, such as flank steak. What’s in Progresso? Apparently, fats don’t dehydrate well.
You can buy dehydrated soups such as lipton. You could use a prepared mix or dehydrate vegies and thin strips of good quality, low-fat meats, then use boulion and assemble your own soups in the field. You’d probably end up with a product that was nutritionally superior to what comes out of the can.
I assume you are after the weight savings, otherwise you could just carry the can of Progresso.
OK I don’t get it.
If you take out the water you have to carry the water to rehydrate it anyway. Why not just carry the can of soup?
I never take trips of more than a week so I carry my water instead of making it with an expensive desalinator or filtering fresh and then boiler it. I think if I had to do that it might take way too long.
I’m already bringing 2 gallons of water per day on most trips. Where can you go and not bring your own water?
Any trip where you have to portage
such as BWCA where you have to carry everything. Some areas prohibit cans and bottles.
Carrying water to me is quite unnatural but thats cause I do lots of lake to lake trips that cover several hundred km.
But on the coast or in salt water of course there are no portages.
Yes I have dehydrated pea soup, bean soup and spaghetti sauce ( I use a dehydrator…its more efficient than oven) but all the pieces are uniform.
If you do dehydrate the chunky beef be careful. Beef has to be rinsed if it has any fat. Fat will go rancid…perhaps not over five days but five weeks is another story.
Just as I figured
I had been looking at the Cache Lake Foods site, and the idea struck me.
I have gotten lazy, and I find JetBoil cooking appeals to my lazy style. Sometimes I will dump a can of RTE soup into the 'Boil, add some quick cooking brown rice and stir like crazy for ten minutes. QED.
This is great for car camping, or base camp camping, but as was pointed out is problematic for the BWCA. I knew that dehydrating sauces was a common practice, and wondered if chunkier soups would work as well. Probably not.
Jim
Check your grocery store
There are a couple soups I particularly like in the dehy realm. Forget all the names right now but Bear Mountain is one of them. Use them in the BW every year.
soup
Why not just buy a dry vegetable soup mix and add some protein (dried meat, bag of chicken or a box of tofu)?
Also cooking some drop biscuits on top of the soup can be a wonderful thing. Mix up all the dry ingredients for the biscuits in a zip lock, keep the crisco separate (it keeps better than butter) and mix them in the zip lock at the camp site. Just mix it with your hands, you won’t dirty another bowl.
dehydrator meals
– Last Updated: Apr-16-10 11:28 AM EST –
I'm very new to the dehydrating game, but recently bought an Excalibur dehydrator to handle our garden vegetables. I'm still in the trial and error stage, but have been thinking about canoe-trip meals from the dehydrator. I like posts like this, and would love to see some suggestions about meal in a bag meals. I haven't bought the vacuum packer yet to go with the dehydrator, but the meals can be heated right in the bags, which is very appealing.
Never tried Crisco
sure fat enhances flavor but olive oil is the best for me. I use it for flavoring and baking in the backcountry, even bannock making.
olive oil
Hmmm I’m not sure if Im going to try making scones with olive oil. I would think the flavor would be a bit off. We do use olive oil in lots of other things though.
We use an Outback Oven for baking, we even made pizza last time we we camped. Mmmm camp pizza and a box of wine.
The pioneers used to do it
– Last Updated: Apr-16-10 12:22 PM EST –
They dehydrated soup into something like fruit leather and called it portable soup. I have a description of the process in a book at home that I can look for this weekend. If I remember correctly it was in the book, The Food Journal of Lewis and Clark. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0972039104/
If you google the book title you will find a PDF that talkes about this in the book. I haven't figured out how to link the PDF.