Freezer Bag Meal Tutorial

I thought it would be helpful to post a short tutorial on freezer bag meals and packing for a backpacking trip. Freezer bag meals are a nice, cheaper alternative to the expensive freeze-dried meals you can get at camping stores. They are good too, just more expensive, so I want to present an alternative. The goal is to just boil some water, add that to the bag of food, and in a few minutes you have a meal ready. No mess to clean up, just simple and straightforward boiling some water. We try and get water on the trail so that we don't have to pack it in. Water is heavy, so the less we have to carry the less our backpacks weigh.

Materials you will need: stove/fuel/lighter, pot, cozy, freezer bags, long-handled spoon/fork/spork, water bottle with measurement marks, and a permanent marker (which I forgot to put in the picture.)

The Goal: Cooking made easy
Step 1, measure and boil the water

Step 2, add water to bag of food

Step 3, put in Cozy. The cozy is actually the secret to making it work. The Cozy can be anything that insulates (store bought and home made both work great) such as a pot holder. I've even seen fancy ones with metalized mylar insulated fabric.

Step 4, wait...

Step 5, let it cool and eat!

Materials
Now, the question is how do you make freezer bag meals. There are a lot of different meals - your imagination is the limit. It will help to learn some of the basics and keep in mind the food pyramid. It helps to start with a carbohydrate to center the meal. This will also help fill you up and keep you going. You can buy several good foundation carbohydrates such as instant rice, oatmeal, couscous, and instant potatoes (not pictured.)

From there the goal is now to make it taste good. You can add sauce mixes, dehydrated veggies, meats, anything you want. I like chicken (in a mylar pouch, not dehydrated), beef jerky, tuna (also in a pouch). For oatmeal you can add dehydrated or freeze-dried fruits, sugar, and even powdered non-dairy creamer. The goal is to make food you want to eat.

There are many web sites with recipes and you can improvise your own. Here I am seeing if I can make regular spaghetti noodles in a freezer bag. They worked great. If you have access to a dehydrator the range of what you can bring is pretty broad. I've seen recipes for freezer-bag chili that use dehydrated, seasoned ground beef. You want to practice (you can boil water on the stove) and try out new foods to make sure you actually like them and want to eat them.

One of the things to think about is re-packaging. The packaging the food comes in is not usually the packaging you want to bring on the hike (with the exception of the expensive freeze-dried meals and foods with liquid like tuna or chicken packets). For example, the bag of freeze-dried strawberries has five servings, so I split it up. Packaging is also designed to make the product look bigger and thus psych you out to think there is more too it. Who needs to pack extra fluffy packaging?

It's also handy to think of things you want to drink as well.

You can also use pre-seasoned kits to help you get started as well. Just watch out for excessive salt (such as the Ramen noodle flavoring packet.)

Putting It All Together
You'll want to package each meal up separately. If there are separate parts to the meal, put them each in their own bag and then put them all in one bag. Important!! Write on each bag the directions for fixing it up. It is pretty tough to mess up a freezer-bag meal but not adding enough water or adding too much will do it in a jiffy. Here I have strawberry oatmeal for breakfast, tortillas with Nutella and Peanut butter (with a side of pineapple slices) for lunch, and a beef teriyaki noodle meal for dinner. I also added three gatorade mixes and some trail mix with strawberries to munch on during the day. It all comes to 1 lb 13 oz.
In the end, pack each day's food in a gallon bag. Pack an extra gallon bag and use that on the first day as your garbage bag. For the second day, use the first day's gallon bag, and so forth. Mark on the gallon bags which day the food is for; this helps with both packing it in your backpack and finding it later when you are hungry.


Recipes
Here are some links to websites with recipes you can start from.

Prepper's Freezer Bag Meals
Trail Cooking Freezer Bag Meals

Here is a site that looks like it has helpful condiments and things to help round out meals, like strawberry breakfast smoothies!
PackItGourmet