 Making dinner in Yosemite's backcountry | We've been dehydrating our vegan backpacking food for a years and really appreciate how it has saved us weight, money and - believe it or not - time. But, storage containers for dried food can be expensive and not very user friendly for the backpacker. |
 Zipliocs, vacuum bags, protective box. I think we can all agree that dehydrated food should be kept in a dry, cool, dark place for storage. The question for us has been about the dry part. We prefer to use pint or quart sized Ziploc freezer bags or snack sized bags. Using individual vacuum sealed-bags is not desirable for us because the bags are not easily reusable, not readily available and are not recyclable. So, after filling a Ziploc and pushing out all the air, It's easy to jam our backpacking meals in to a cupboard or closet, but how do we keep them dry and reduce exposure to air? We have a solution that is inexpensive, flexible, easy to maintain and helps to preserve our food; we store all of our bags of dried food in larger vacuum-seal storage bags which are protected inside of common hard-sided storage containers. | Categories All |
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We've been using the medium sized vacuum bags from 'Honey Can Do'. We bought a box of two from Amazon.com, but just about any vacuum sealed storage bags should do just fine provided that they have one-way valves. The two that we have are big enough to store all of our dried foods for backpacking so far. But, they're readily available, so we can always pick up a couple more if we need to.
Look for a valve like this! The key feature you want to look for in your vacuum storage bag is the ability to suck out all the air with a vacuum you already own. We use a handheld vacuum cleaner. On these bags, there is a small one-way valve. We open the bag, do our business, then vacuum out the air with our handheld vacuum.
Keeping our storage bags vacuum sealed not only help to preserve our dried foods, but also helps keep the individual bags vacuum packed, which makes it easier for us to pack our backpacks or bear canister, which can result in significant space savings on longer trips.
See also, "Dehydrating Backpacking Food".
See also, "Dehydrating Backpacking Food".