I have a 5 day hike in a national park in Chile. I was wondering if it's safe for me to cook/grill chicken breast or a steak before entering the park, put it in a Ziploc bag and consume it the day after or maybe the next after that.
I don't like the idea of doing that with uncooked meat, but somehow, the idea of pre-cooking the meat before the hike does not seem dangerous.
Any advice in the matter?
I strongly recommend you don't follow the plan you outlined, bringing cold cooked meat along on your hike to eat after a day or two. You almost certainly can not achieve this while following food safety guidelines. Sometimes you get away with taking risks with food safety. Other times you will make yourself extremely ill. In the case of a multi-day wilderness hike, the worst possible consequences of severe illness are much worse than in the safety of civilization. In a worst case scenario, you could have severe diarrhea and vomiting, which causes dehydration, which makes you weak, shaky and dizzy. Now imagine trying to hike all the way back to the trailhead in this weakened state, while also having to stop frequently to again vomit and/or defecate. Or trying to call for emergency evacuation, which may or may not be possible due to limited phone service, and then wait how ever many hours for emergency assistance to reach you.
There are a few things you could do to improve your plan and make it less risky. Whether you can actually stay within food safety guidelines is impossible to determine without knowing all the details and doing some tests (more on that below). But you will certainly be safer if you take some of the precautions below, than if you follow your original plan of eating unrefrigerated meat.
Look up the predicted temperature range for the time and place of your hike. This will have a huge effect on how long it takes meat to spoil. If it's going to be hot summer weather, I wouldn't try it. If it will be cool spring / fall temperatures, I suggest doing a test run, as described below. In cold winter weather, you have a pretty decent chance of keeping your food safe, although I might still do a test run for safety. If the temperature won't get above 40° F / 4.4° C, frozen meat should stay safe as long as you don't store your food bag in the sun, next to the fire, or in your tent with you overnight.
Unless it's below freezing all day, forget about the "or two" part of "a day or two." One day is possible. Two days is asking for food poisoning.
Fully cook the meat ahead of time. That means no rare steaks (it wouldn't be rare anymore by the time you reheated it, so not too much of a loss there).
Freeze the cooked meat. Frozen meat will take longer to warm up to "danger zone" temperatures than unfrozen meat.
With frozen meat, you need a plan for how you will safely thaw the frozen meat if it's still frozen at the time you plan to reheat it. Use thinner cuts, but package them together in a stack. Stacking them keeps the surface area low, which will slow the thawing process during travel. When you want to reheat them, separate the stack and thaw them together. Start with several thin cuts, wrap them individually in plastic wrap, stack them while they're still unfrozen so they can kind of squish together a bit, to avoid air pockets, place the stack in a good quality freezer bag and freeze it. That way the whole block has the least surface area, so it stays frozen longest, but you can separate the individual pieces when it's time to cook them. (If you have a vacuum sealer, use that instead of plastic wrap and bags.)
Keep it frozen while you travel from your home to the trailhead. If you have an actual freezer in your vehicle, use that. If not, use a good cooler and lots of ice.
Insulate the frozen meat. You can get various lightweight insulated envelopes that are intended for mailing food and medicine. I found a lot of inexpensive options by searching "lightweight insulated envelope."
Don't eat the meat cold. Re-heat it to the safe reheating temperature for leftovers, 165° F or 73.4° C.
Keep in mind it will probably be partially frozen. One way is to simmer it in a sauce. To keep your pack weight down, I recommend bringing your sauce ingredients in a dry form. Or, you could pack the meat in sous vide bags, and reheat it in simmering water.
Do a test run at as close to real-world conditions as you can manage, then measure the temperature of your meat. If it stayed below 40° F / 4.4° C, you have a reasonable chance of not poisoning yourself on your hike.
Look up the expected day and night temperatures for the first day of your hike. Find a location in or near your home that has similar temperatures. Eg, if the expected weather for your hike is hotter than the outdoor temperatures now where you live, maybe you have an unheated garage, or a poorly insulated mudroom that achieves a similar range. Or maybe you have a bored friend who lives at a different altitude and/or latitude who could run the test for you. Or maybe you can put the meat in a cooler with a little bit of ice and a digital thermometer that you can monitor from outside the cooler.
Cook your meat, package it, freeze it, and wrap it in insulation, exactly as you plan to do on your hike.
Leave it in your simulated hike environment for as long as you plan on waiting before you eat it. Don't forget to simulate the travel time from your home to the trailhead, in whatever cooler you plan to use. (As I mentioned above, two days is probably not going to work, but feel free to test it, and please do let me know if I'm wrong about that.)
Open the package and take its temperature at multiple points. If all the meat is below 40° F / 4.4° C, congrats, it's safe to eat.
If you're not going to bring a meat thermometer on your trip, familiarize yourself with what the meat looks and feels like while still safe. Poke it, and notice how hard or soft it is. Feel the outside of the package - is it still icy cold, or merely chilly? Leave some of the meat out at room temperature until it's not safe anymore. Compare how it looks and feels once unsafe. Consider whether you will be able to tell the difference out on the trail.
(Optional) Practice cooking some of the safe meat (not the stuff you left out until it wasn't safe anymore in step 5) in the same way you plan to cook it on the trail. Eat it. Is it good? Was it worth all the effort you put into it, and the extra weight compared to a dehydrated meal?
If your wrapping and insulation technique works well in the expected temperatures, you could actually bring raw meat and cook it on the trail. I would only try this if your test run stayed well within the safe temperature range; I wouldn't try this if it got close to the upper end of the range. The obvious advantage is that it would taste a lot better than re-heated pre-cooked meat. The disadvantage is that you handle raw meat on the trail, and safe food handling and cleanup is much more difficult without hot running water to wash your hands and cutting board. Plus you have the risk of raw meat juice leaking onto your other stuff. It's doable, but you need to plan ahead. Making a beef stew can work pretty well - bring a single, sealed package of pre-cut chunks of beef, cut it open and squeeze the still partially frozen lump and any meat juices into a simmering stewpot. Put the packaging in your trash bag without touching any of your other stuff, then rinse and sanitize your hands and the knife you used to cut open the package.
Prepare for the possibility that despite all your precautions, your meat simply gets warmer than you expected, and it just doesn't seem safe to eat. If that happens:
My personal opinion is, in most circumstances, it won't be worth the hassle that comes with doing it safely, and it's certainly not worth the risk of doing it un-safely. But, I do see the appeal. If you can pull it off safely, real meat can be a huge treat. You can find some middle ground by using smoked or otherwise partially preserved meats, such as bacon, hot dogs, or ham. You should still keep them cold as you would for fresh meat, but the nitrates in them will at least slow bacterial growth, so you have some margin for error. Summer sausage is also a nice option; it's shelf stable but not as dry as beef jerky, which makes it heavier but it seems more like "real" food, so it's a nice treat. And of course you can find a variety of canned meats, as well as chicken, tuna and salmon in foil packets. Those are still a treat compared to dried foods; they taste better, but they weigh a lot more.
It's entirely possible to buy shelf-stable cans of meat that will last for months or years, because the canning process kills all the bacteria that might grow on the meat and make it inedible, while also sealing the meat away to that it won't be recontaminated by the environment. It should be entirely safe to take such a can of meat along with you on a camping trip, as long as you consume the entirety of such a can once it's been opened.
I'm not just talking about canned fish or Spam, either; there's a number of companies that sell canned corned/ground beef or chunks of chicken breast. It's probable that such a can might serve for whatever culinary purposes your pre-cooked meat would have served, though you'll probably want some sort of spoon or fork if you just want to eat it straight out of the can.
It's not safe. Meat spoils quickly.
However, here in the US there is a safe way to hike with chicken:
https://starkist.com/products/premium-white-chicken-pouch
It's prepared like canning but it's in a foil pouch.
They also sell such packs of tuna fish.
I feel like I've seen other meats this way but a quick search isn't turning them up.
This is unsafe unless you can keep the food at or below 4°C (39°F) until it is consumed.
There are many questions about this on the cooking SE, where they have a thread devoted to proper storage of food. To quote the highest upvoted answer by Aaronut:
The USDA has this to say on it:
Storing Leftovers
One of the most common causes of foodborne illness is improper cooling of cooked foods. Because bacteria are everywhere, even after food is cooked to a safe internal temperature, they can be reintroduced to the food and then reproduce. For this reason leftovers must be put in shallow containers for quick cooling and refrigerated within 2 hours.You'll find similar statements from government agencies around the world. The safe limit for raw or cooked food is 2 hours in the danger zone (40-140°F or 4.4-60°C).
There are a number of ways you can prepare certain types of meat to enable you to store it in room temperature conditions. You could make buy or make beef jerky, for instance. The key in that is that the meat has been cured by dehydration.
If making beef jerky (I personally don't enjoy store-bought jerky), make sure to follow a good recipe with an eye for food safety. Also, I would recommend making small vacuum packages if possible, after cooling the pieces completely. Sealed, it will be safe to eat for a number of days up to 2 weeks, depending on circumstances.
Just cooking it to a food-safe temperature is not the same as curing, so a grilled piece of chicken breast will be safe to eat for at most 2 hours, if unrefrigerated. I have brought cooked chicken on a picnic, wrapped in foil and packed with a few ice-packs in a cooling bag, but bringing cooling equipment on a hike will not be convenient, so it's most likely not a path I would recommend.
Enjoy your hike!
You can dehydrate cooked chicken in a home dehydrator. Bake a chicken breast (you want almost no fat in it), cut it into cubes, and dehydrate it. To use it, boil it in some water a few hours before you want to eat. Let it sit with a lid (and perhaps also a towel around it) while you set up camp and whatever, then bring it back to the boil and add other stuff to it, cook some rice, whatever. You can make nice chicken stew or curry in the wilderness this way. You can do the same with beef (choose a very lean cut.) Cooked ground beef also works and rehydrates faster than the cubes.
When canoe camping, where weight is not an issue, I rehydrate meat cubes by putting them in a Nalgene bottle in the morning, adding boiling water, and carrying them around all day, then cooking them when we get to camp.
There are ways to make meat safe for multiple day excursions, but it's not something I would recommend for a do-it-yourself project. When I used to take trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, we would take summer sausages. Those are cured in a way that makes them reasonably stable at normal temperatures for a week. For the first day meal, we might use meat that was deep frozen when we started the trip - half a day was about the right amount of time for it to thaw but still be cold.
Packing any food (except fully pulverized one) in zip bags is the worst idea ever! It creates perfect conditions for bacteria: a micro-atmosphere full of moisture!
If you want your food to last longer, you need to remove as much moisture as possible. Frying is much better than boiling or roasting, because it removes a lot of water. The best thing is smoking - this is what the people all over the world were doing before refrigeration and canning was invented.
Unless there's a reason you want a DIY variant, the best option is to buy canned or vacuum packed food.
Unfortunately, pre-cooking your chicken or steak and storing it in a Ziploc bag for 2-3 days on a hike is not a safe practice. Even though the meat is cooked initially, there are several key factors that increase the risk of foodborne illness in this scenario:
Temperature danger zone: Cooked meat needs to be kept at a safe temperature, ideally between 40°F (4°C) and 140°F (60°C) to prevent bacterial growth. Without proper refrigeration, cooked meat left at ambient temperature can quickly enter the "danger zone" where bacteria multiply rapidly, even within a few hours.
Limited cooling: During your hike, it's highly unlikely you'll have access to consistent refrigeration to maintain safe temperatures for the meat. Even using a cooler with ice packs may not be sufficient for extended periods, especially in warmer environments.
Contamination risk: After cooking, handling the meat for packaging and storage can introduce new bacteria, especially if proper hygiene practices aren't followed meticulously. Additionally, the Ziploc bag itself might not be entirely germ-free, further increasing the risk of contamination.
Spoilage: Even if bacteria growth isn't a concern, pre-cooked meat can still spoil and develop unpleasant odors and textures over time, even if refrigerated.
Alternatives: Here are some safer options for consuming protein on your hike:
Dried or dehydrated meats: These are lightweight, shelf-stable, and provide a good source of protein. Canned meats: Choose options packed in water for lower sodium content. Jerky: A classic trail food offering protein and long shelf life. Trail mix with nuts and seeds: Provides protein, healthy fats, and other essential nutrients. High-protein bars: Look for options with natural ingredients and limited added sugar. Remember: Foodborne illness can be very unpleasant and even dangerous, especially in remote locations with limited access to medical care. It's always best to err on the side of caution and choose safer food options for your hike.
A couple options I have not seen on here:
My father used to tell me of when he and a friend packed steaks in dry ice and ate them at the end of a multi-day hike. So, can it be done? Yes. Should it be done? It's up to you; the risk is yours to take. There is always a risk of spoilage when storing meat in uncontrolled conditions.
