Quick question for those who make their own trail meals.

If you vaccum seal the bags like I do, Would there be any problems adding the boiling water directly into the vac bag and letting the meals sit till re-hydrated ?

Or would that leach out any weird chems into your food ?

Thanks

Mac

We tried this a few years ago while on a multi day peak hike/summit. The bags do not hold up vey well to the hot water or heat and we had more them one bag that lost any sense of plasticity, if you will. Keep this in mind when you are cooking over your "go big or go home" fires...

Now days, we carry the food in the bags and heat water in the pot shown below then put the food in (without the bag). This pot is made from hard-anodized aluminum with a titanium coating. It holds just under a liter of water and the rubber coated handles are much better then uncoated style. These pots are $28.00 at MEC and well worth the price.



As for the leaching, thats a good question. most commercial freeze dried bags are meant to be heated with hot water. The vac seal bags are not much more then gloried ziplock type plastic and you should contact the manufacturer of the bags you use and ask them.

Ha, nice. So you do have a sense of humour after all.

I only light fires if I have to, normally my raptor/snow peak titaninm cook set works fine.

The reason I asked is because I am getting too lazy to be washing dishes if I don't need to, I thought pouring the boiling water directly into the bag would make life a lot easier for those days when scrubbing pots with sand is just too much bother. I figured someone here played with the idea before, I suppose I could give it a whack and see what happens. As I am not "sane" anyway I guess a few leached plastic chemicals would do little harm.

Thanks for the info Hiker.

Check Backpacking sites for input and recipes. With as many people that do FBC I think you will have enough people that are ok with eating out of a zip lock. (they do generally recommend frezzer bags for cooking. If you need the links just ask).

I do freezer bag cooking a lot. Its simple & cleanup is non existent. There is a website dedicated to it-oddly enough, called freezerbagcooking.com. Check them out for some great ideas.
A suggestion (born from trial & error), use the brand name freezer bags-they hold up best. I used store brand ones, and have had a couple of failures. Not catastrophic, but certainly some leakage.

Most of my recipes are from the book "backpack Gormet" by Linda yaffe. Excellent book but not designed for freezer bag type eating. I checked a few websites but can't really find any that mention to the possibility of any stuff in the plastic getting into the food as hot water is added. I tried it about an hour ago on some food I dried a couple of years ago. The bag got really...(Looking for the word)
Soggy. yeah, soggy like.

It kinda warped/deformed a lot as well. The food didn't seem to have a plastic taste. I hope nothing seeped out from the plastic into my food.

Siple as hell tho, Don't know why I haven't tried this sooner.

Luckily the bag did not start to leak or break apart completely.

To elaborate further on my original post. There is nothing more disheartening after expending 6000 calories or more in a day hiking and climbing only to find that your dinner in a bag has just kissed the ground because the bag decided to give out completely from the hot water. No matter how much your g/f or friends love you, they will not relish the thought of having to share their dinner with you as their bodies are craving the needed calories as much as your body is.

Carry the food in the bag and use a pot, you will much better off in the long run/hike.

Ok gotta chime in here. I think I vaccumm seal EVERYTHING. I put up a lot of food and have used both the re-hydration method that you have asked about and used it as a boiling bag and have never had a failure. I say this having never done it when this was the only thing to eat for 10 miles.

I am a little anal about my food storage though, I double seal top and bottom. The only thing I would warn about is reusing the bag. They loose something and I have had very poor luck the second time useing them. With that said, enjoy...

Yeah, my vac sealer gets used plenty as well. I double seal any food I keep for emergency storage. I really am too lazy to be rotating food every year so I store rice mixed with a few tablespoons of salt. Long, long after I die my great grandchildren will be able to tear open those bags of rice and I am betting they will be still very eatable. The only real expense is the sealing bags.

My only concern was anything leaching from the bag to the food when the hot boiling water sat in it for 10-15 minutes. From all I have been reading it does not appear to be a concern. I may switch to the double layered sealing bags for anything I plan to pour boiling water into.

The older military meals - LURPs - were nothing more than a dehydrated meal that was rehydrated in the pouch with water then eaten. The puches appeared to me to be just regular heavy duty plastic bags. If you didn't have hot water you poured in cold then stashed the pouch under your shirt to rehydrate/get semi warm. I ate quite a few of these and don't think I suffered any long term ill effects. Some of the short term effects were pretty bad.

The older MREs had hockey pucks - beef or pork patties - that were similar. Reydrate in the plastic bag.

In my neck of the woods, products just like this but with civilian marketing and distribution are sold basically everywhere. The bag seems to be both alu-foil and plastic. The brands I have experience with are local to my location, but I guess you find similar stuff for sale on the internet if not locally. Quite popular among hikers around here, but not exactly high class gourmet, with flavors ranging from edible to will-do-if-hungry-enough.

I'm sure you can make a lot better stuff yourself...

Re-using those plastic/alu-foil bags seems like a better option than using the plastic bags of your vacuum sealer. A lot more compact and lighter than a pot, and a lot more reliable than the vacuum sealer bags. But with that option you haven't really eliminated cleaning from the equation.

A retort bag would be better. They are foil/plastic melded together. They will take the heat of boiling hot water without losing their structural integrity (melt). MRE pouches are retort, as are the freeze dried bags that actually direct you to add hot water to the bag with the food in it to re-hydrate.

Unfortunately retort bags are not easy to come by.

We also store dry parboiled rice, beans, flour in plastic bags, but I am afraid to cook in a plastic bag not specifically labeled for that use. I am not a chemist, but it is my understanding that plastic starts out hard, like bakelite, and a chemical softener is added to make it pliable. There are so many different formulas for plastic, and some are harmful when the chemicals that leach out are ingested. They have come out and warned against microwaving food in plastic, or drinking bottled water that got hot in a car. You might notice that plastic wares that are labled for microwave use are hard as a rock...no softeners. I remember hearing stories from WWII of wounded soldiers dying of 'shock lung', not directly from their injuries, but from tranfusions of blood that was stored in plastic bags. I know we're talking rice and dried foods and not blood and microwaves, but IMO it so easy to have a pot, bowl, or multi-purpose canteen cup along, that it's not worth the risk to me. I have washed out many a bowl in the sand and gravel of the lakes in the North woods and the Boundary Waters. I feel safer, and the little fish love me.

+1 on the ziplock freezer bag meals. I think with the vac sealed bags if you had a cozy you would be okay. IDK.

Thats why I stressed getting the name brand freezer bags.

I like the retort bag idea-not a clue where to find them, and they are likely far too expensive to be practical. I havent had any issues with the quality bags at all. One thing I recommend is using some sort of cozy-I have a GSI cookset, and the pot comes is a rubberized fabric bag-I use that as a cozy. Worst case, if the bag leaked, it would leak into the rubberized bag-and I would still be fine. I am sure an insulated mug would work too, if it were large enoough.