Useful Winter Food Tips

Meal planning for winter backpacking:

1. Nature provides the refrigeration: The weather is cold, so your pack is like a refrigerator or freezer. Food will stay fresh and preserved.
2. Plan carefully. You don’t want to eat frozen food, such as a frozen sandwich. In the mild winters of the Pacific Northwest, a sandwich will likely be fine on most trips, but once temperatures get close to 25ºF or lower for extended times, sandwiches can freeze. You cannot cold soak food or even set it aside to cool because it will freeze. You can, however, hot soak ingredients, such as pasta, to reduce cook time. You can, for example, put pasta in a Nalgene bottle, add boiling water, and then put the bottle in your down jacket or sleeping bag. The bottle will heat you and slowly cook the pasta.
3. Test meals at home in the cold. It helps to do meal preparation outside in the cold using your camp gear. This will give a more accurate understanding of what is required.
4. You don’t need expensive processed and freeze-dried meals. In fact, for short overnight trips, you don’t need any freeze-dried food. Many common foods, such as couscous and pasta, are affordable and already dry.
5. Dehydrating vegetables is easy: If you want dried vegetables, you can easily dry vegetables in your own oven on a regular cookie sheet. No special equipment is required. Simply chop the vegetables in similar bite-sized portions, sprinkle with olive oil and spread on a cookie sheet. Pre-heat the over to 400–430ºF and roast for 25–40 or 60 minutes, depending on how much you want to dry out the vegetables. Turn off over and leave the vegetables in the oven to dry further if desired. You can, but you don’t need to dry out the vegetables much. Simply roasting them is enough. You can roast vegetables with or without olive oil. However, olive oil is packed with calories and your body needs fat (olive oil contains monounsaturated fats which also help lower LDL cholesterol, reducing heart disease and stroke). Olive oil also makes the vegetables taste great.
6. Avoid long re-hydration periods. Unless you have a lot of fuel and are in a base camp situation, avoid foods, such as rice, beans, some pastas, dried mushrooms, etc., that require soaking or long cook times.
7. Soups work best in cold weather: It is easier to keep meals hot if they are in fluids, such as soups, Ramen, or Phö.
8. Choose fast cooking pastas: Many types of Italian pastas and Asian noodles have quick cook times (3–5 minutes) and these will save fuel. Generally speaking, smaller, thinner noodles cook faster. For example, Chunka Soba Japanese style noodles (1–2 minites), Kuan Miao sliced noodles (4 minutes), Vermicelli (5–7 minutes), Acini di Pepe (4–9 minutes), and XL rice noodles (8 minutes), and Italian-style spaghetti (8–12 minutes).
9. Avoid over cooking: Vegetables cook faster when cut into small dime-size pieces. Have everything ready and organized to avoid leaving the stove unattended while preparing food.
10. Know yourself: If you are a teenager, both burning calories on the trail and feeding a growing body, or someone who simply tends to eat large portions, you may want larger portions than specified in the recipes here. The recipes here are good enough to eat at home. Try them out at home before testing them in the field and adjust quantities as needed. Many Asian noodles are packaged with “portion control ribbons” that function as a recommended quantity. Each portion is around 3–3.25 ounces of dry noodles. This is, for me, a large portion once the other ingredients are added. A regular size portion at home would only require about 2.5 ounces of noodles.
11. Adapt to the Wilderness. Some techniques you may use at home are best abandoned along with all the convenient kitchen tools you have at home. Keep you pack weight down as much as possible for comfort and safety. As much as I try to eat well on the trail, there is no way to prepare meals on the trail in the same way I would prepare them at home. I do not, for example, rinse rice noodles when I’m on the trail.

Cooking Tools and Technique

Avoid weighing yourself down with specialty cooking tools, such as strainers, pasta grabbers, tongs, and colanders. A pot, occasional skillet, cup, and a large spoon is usually sufficient.

Cooking, water, and storage gear list

• 1-liter pot
• Skillet pot lid (small) and/or large ultra-lite Titanium camping skillet
• Skillet (large 8″ Titanium)
• Metal plate (optional). I take this in the summer when I’m not bringing a pot.
• Bamboo spoon
• Bamboo fork or chop sticks
• Insulated pot warmers and/or pot coaster
• Cup
• 2 Nalgene bottles (1 liter + half liter, for drinking and hot water bottles)
• 8oz Wide-Mouth Nalgene (Mainly for shoulder season meals, such as Soy milk for Muesli)
• Metal flask (tea and/or hot drinks)
• Small 1 and 2 oz. sauce container(s)
• Bear-proof container (bear and fox protection). Sometimes required in National Parks.
• Metal lunch box (rodent protection). For most trips, this is all the food protection that is needed.

Why use a 1-liter Pot with Skillet lid: If you want or need to select a cook pot for winter use, I recommend finding one that has a skillet lid for scooping snow, such as the Snow Peak Trek 900 Titanium pot.* The Trek 900 is 6.2 oz (175 g) and has a 30.4-fluid ounce capacity (there are 33.814 fluid ounces in a liter, so this pot is slightly less than a full liter). This pot is excellent for melting snow and preparing meals. It has a few advantages over the most common alternatives:

• A lid that doubles as a skillet and functions well as a scooping tool for gathering snow to melt.
• A wider shape that provides greater stability when cooking on snow
• The shape allows for the pot to slip over the end of a packed tent for better fitting in a backpack.

The skillet lid is large enough to cook the small 4-inch flour or corn street tacos.

Large Skillet for sautéing: When a meal requires sautéing, you may want a larger skillet. They make Titanium ones that are 8 inches wide, 1 inch deep and only 5.25 ounces.

Cup: A small titanium cup is useful for tea, breakfast, and soups.

Make a pot warmer and coasters: For really cold weather I recommend making an insulated pot warmer to keep cooked meals and hot water from cooling down too fast. A small pot coaster is also useful for keeping the pot warm. To prevent the food burning, you will often need to get the skillet off the flame and place it on a coaster during the cooking process, such as mixing in the sauce.

A wooden spoon: Bamboo spoons are lighter than titanium spoons and don’t scrape the pot and skillet—especially nice when sautéing and stirring food.

Wide-mouth Nalgene containers: Small 1 and 2 fluid-ounce containers are ideal for sauces and oils. The wide-mouth design works better in cold weather. If the sauce gets frozen it will be easier to get the contents out of a wide opening.

Cooking Technique

Using a stove that doesn’t have great heat control (no simmering) and thin cooking pots is challenging. Food will burn quickly.

Here are some best practices:

• Make sure your cooking space is set up well
• Prepare an area large enough to set your pot and skillet when they are off the flame.
• Make sure the stove it stable and protected from wind.
• If you are using a liquid-fuel stove (recommended in temps below 20ºF), make sure the fuel-pump value is in the correct position. The value must point up. This is usually means slipping a piece of ice or a rock under the top of the fuel bottle to get the desired position.
• Make sure all the ingredients and cooking tools are near by and easy to reach.
• Make sure you have gloves or a pot holder that doesn’t melt and allows you to securely move the pot around and hold it as long as required.
• When boiling hot water overflows it will dissolve the snow supporting the stove making the stove unstable. Keep your snow shovel handy if you need to recut a surface.

When you need to add ingredients, take the pot or skillet off the flame and set it on a large pot-size insulated coaster. Mix in the sauce or whatever ingredients and then hold the pot back over the flame. Avoid leaving anything other than boiling water sitting on the stove supports. Most sautéing of vegetables or cooking of food such as Quesadillas requires that you hold the pot or skillets far enough above the flame to avoid burning it.

Forget about rinsing noodles. Wilderness cooking is not home cooking. You don’t usually have enough water to rinse noodles. Just drain the noodles or remove them from the hot water when they are needed. Let’s assume you are going to add noodles to a stir fry in cold weather. If it takes 3 minutes to cook the noodles, put the noodles in the water to soak as the water heats up and comes to a boil. Boil for 1 to 1.5 minutes, then set aside. Start the stir fry and let it cook for 2–3 minutes, then scoop the noodles out of the warm water and add them to the stir fry. Stir for a minute, mix in final ingredients and stir for another 2 minutes. The whole process takes less than ten minutes.

Cooking stove

Most people I know use canister stoves even in winter. Because I want a stove that is reliable in cold weather, below 10ºF, I am in the habit of using a liquid-fuel stove. This type of stove enables the fuel pressure to be controlled with a hand pump ensuring no loss in performance as temperatures drop and altitude increases.

I use a MSR International, which has no fine control for simmering, so it takes a little bit of practice to use with a skillet.

• Liquid-fuel Stove
• Fuel pump and bottle
• Lighter
• Windscreen

*Unlike some cooking systems, which are stoves that come integrated with a cooking pot, liquid fuel stoves do not include cooking pots. This meals you have to select your own cook pot.

PNW Guide to where to find the ingredients

Where can you get the ingredients used in these recipes? These days, quite often any grocery store in a major metro area will have most, if not all of what you need. Because this website is mainly focused on backpacking in the Cascade Mountains—which are near Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Vancouver, British Columbia—the recipes reflect the character of this regional. There are many American grocery store chains in the Pacific Northwest that now carry Asian foods. There are also some stores that cater specifically to Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean cuisine (Asia includes India). I shop at them all.

Shopping

Find a grocery store near you. In my specific area there are seven stores that I frequent, depending on what I need. These include:

• Ranch 99: A large store with mostly Chinese/Taiwanese groceries. There are two stores in the Seattle area. It has sesame oil, chili oil, soy sauces, rice and buckwheat noodles, also knife pare noodles, dried mushrooms, etc. They have good produce—sprouts, herbs, etc. They also have some light-weight prepackaged meals, such as Taihodien Spicy Noodles.
• H Mart: Mostly Korean groceries with many stores in Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, Portland, etc. A good place to find noodles, such as rice noodles, soba, Ramen, knife pare noodles, etc.; Korean chili powder (Gochuguru); broad Bean Sauce, plant-based Oyster sauce, dried mushrooms, Kombu, Miso soups, and good produce.
• Uwajimaya: There are around ten Japanese grocery stores in the Seattle area, but this one is a Seattle landmark establishment going back to 1928. Originally located in downtown Seattle, they now have locations in Bellevue and Renton too. Unfortunately it is too far from me so I rarely shop there, but I have known hikers to pick up Sushi and snacks there and bring them on the trail.
• Biblos: Middle Eastern and Mediterranean groceries. There are more than 10 Mediterranean stores in the Seattle area. Great for Tahini, Bulgar, Couscous, Falafel, spices, flat breads, olives, dried fruit, and nuts. They have good produce and large quantities of fresh herbs.
• Go Go Mart: Indian groceries. There are about 10 such stores in the Seattle area. They have snacks such as Mumbai Mix, as well as Naan, dates, Indian desserts and prepared meals.
• Trader Joes: Popular grocery chain in the Seattle area. Especially useful for nuts and dried fruit, organic extra firm tofu, sun-dried tomatoes, olives, tortellini, produce in small quantities, and dips, such as Eggplant Hummus. They also have Vegan Phö broth.
• QFC: Popular and large-store grocery chain in the Seattle area. They have the small street tortillas, rice noodles, Chana, Tandori Roasted Peanuts, Seaweed snacks, Spring roll raps, Vegan Phö broth, and good produce.
• Costco: A chain of membership-only big-box retail stores. Useful for buying large quantities of Walnuts, Almonds, and Soy or Oat Milk.

Let me know your favorite store below.