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.