Drying Food

When thinking about ways to reduce food weight, an important factor is how much water it contains. Water is the heaviest item that takes up space in your pack. The idea is, since we'll be drinking tons of water anyway, there's no need to carry it within our food.

Fresh fruit meets many of the criteria of good ultralight food - high nutritional content, good taste, easy to prepare, and cheap. But fruit has a high water content, which means it's heavy. This is where dehydrated fruit comes into play. All of the fruit's nutritional content remains intact, making dried fruit as close to a perfect ultralight food as you'll find. I've discovered that many hard core backpackers use dehydration machines to suck water out of everything they bring. This immediately brough to mind the Dark Crystal and sucking the water/essence out of those muppets with the big purple crystal. Then, I stopped thinking about that and realized that in order to be a really 'hardcore' backpacker, I had to buy my own fruit vampire device and it wasn't going to be Bunnicula. SO, I ordered a dehydrator. Every day I feel like I'm undertaking a middle school science experiment. It's really awesome. I choose a fruit or veggie, either parboil it or dunk it in lemon juice (to prevent browning), cut it up, arrange the pieces in nice geometric designs on the circular drying racks, turn on the switch, go to bed, wake up, smell the inense flavor of whatever is being water vampired and then VOILA! Little shriveled remnants of the once glorious fruit or veggie that weigh almost nothing and can be put in little plastic baggies. The only problem is, I can't stop munching on these dried goodies and so I've succeeded in saving about 10 pieces of dehydrated food-stuff out of the countless things I've shriveled. I've got to make myself stop eating all of it before the trail! Hopefully I can bribe my mom into dehydrating food while we're gone to pack in our mail drops...I LOVE YOU MOM!!!