New answers tagged backpacking
1
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 -...
2
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 ...
0
A couple options I have not seen on here:
Pack your meat in dry ice with insulating container.
Opt for freeze-dried meat.
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 ...
2
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 ...
2
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 ...
14
Take shelf-stable canned meat instead.
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 ...
27
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 ...
12
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.
9
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 ...
-3
Before there were refrigerators, people would routinely continue to eat from a piece of meat until it started to smell bad. This was pretty much all you could do with a big carcass like a cow, which couldn't be finished off at one sitting. Salting and brine were used only when you wanted the meat to keep for much longer periods, like weeks or months on a ...
1
This may be a southern US thing, but tobacco either from a cigarette or the chewing type can be used to reduce pain in a bee/wasp sting.
It can be done by getting the tip of a cigarette wet then squeezing liquid out onto the sting or by mixing the dry tobacco with water to make a paste, chewing tobacco can be used in the same way by getting it wet then ...
5
Wild Plantain! I have very strong reactions to stings, but this "weed" has provided the most and swiftest pain and swelling reduction for bee/wasp stings that I have found in around 40 years of traipsing around the woods. I've been able to find it 3 seasons of the year in cities and in the country. I typically make a simple spit poultice, just chew ...
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