Make your own trekking food

In our new series, we show you how to make your own trekking food. Ready-made trekking meals from outdoor stores are often expensive and harmful to the environment. A single meal can easily cost between 6 and 9 euros, and the disposable packaging is anything but sustainable. Our alternative: prepare your own meals, dehydrate them and save money and resources in the process.

Advantages of self-dehydration

You can dehydrate food using either a dehydrator or a conventional oven. You know exactly what ingredients are in your trekking food, save costs and can use sustainable packaging. For tours where weight is not an issue, we use reusable tins. If it needs to be light, we use ziplock bags that we can reuse later. It is important that trekking food is not only nutritious but also tasty. After an exhausting day, it’s frustrating if you can’t look forward to your meal. That’s why we test different recipes and share our honest opinion on preparation and taste. This is part 2 of this format. You should also try our red lentil Bolognese with fusilli.

Make your own trekking food: Recipe for Cream of mushroom soup

We were inspired by Valentine for this recipe. You can find her original recipe here. Before you start cooking, here’s a quick note. This format is for trying out recipes. We always rate them at the end. We weren’t super happy with the recipe for the soup. You can find out more in the summary.

Ingredients:

• – 150 g mushrooms, fresh
  – 1 small onion
  – 375 ml vegetable stock, hot
  – 2 tbsp butter
  – 2 tbsp flour
  – 125 ml sweet cream
  – salt and pepper

Calories per portion: approx. 478 kcal

Preparation:

1. Finely chop the onion and fry in a little oil.

2. Cut the mushrooms into small pieces.

3. Add the mushroom pieces to the onions and sauté.

5. Place the 2 tbsp butter in a separate pan and sieve in 2 tbsp flour. Add the vegetable stock to the roux. Add the cream and stir well.

6. Now add the mushrooms. Season everything well with salt and pepper.

7. For all those who don’t like the consistency of mushrooms, you can now puree the soup with a blender. But then it won’t look as yummy anymore.

8. Spread the soup onto the parchment paper.

9. Dehydrate everything at 63°C (145°F) until it is dry and brittle (approx. 8 hours).

10. Pack the finished dry meal airtight, e.g. in ziplock bags.

Outdoor preparation:

1. Pour the dry meal into your pot.

2. Add approx. 250 ml water – preferably a little less at first, then more if necessary.

3. Leave the whole thing to stand for about 15 minutes.

4. Heat everything on your burner for 2-3 minutes and stir well.

5. Allow the dish to cool briefly before enjoying to avoid burning.

Conclusion on Cream of mushroom soup

The cream of mushroom soup tastes great in every way – there’s nothing to complain about here. Unfortunately, however, the soup is difficult to rehydrate. The first time I tried to prepare the large pieces of dried soup outside, the rehydration did not work well at all. The pieces remained hard and did not dissolve completely. For the second portion, I mixed the dry pieces into a powder, which significantly improved the rehydration, but the result was still not ideal. Overall, the cream of mushroom soup therefore only gets 4 out of 10 points. Great taste, but unfortunately not convincing in practical use.

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