Chris walks listeners through his newest freeze-dried camp meal experiment — a hearty beef stroganoff with ready-to-eat pasta that requires no boiling or extra cook time. Filmed and tested beside a riverside campfire, this episode blends practical bushcraft cooking, real-world experimentation in the wilderness.
Welcome back to the Primitive Camping & Bushcraft Podcast and another Fundamental Friday around the fire. Today Chris shares how he’s been creating his own freeze-dried meals at home for camping — specifically a homemade beef stroganoff that rivals anything you can buy in a pouch. He walks through every step of the recipe using Thrive Life freeze-dried beef, mushrooms, sour cream powder, and brown gravy mix, all packed into vacuum-sealed bags for the next outdoor trip.
The real twist comes when Chris discovers a game-changing ingredient: ready-to-eat pasta that completely removes the need to cook noodles over the fire. He tests the meal on an overnight river trip, showing how simple it can be to eat well while staying primitive.
As the meal thickens over the fire and camp conversation begins to fade into the crackle of wood, Chris reminds us that time outdoors is more than a break from life — it’s a moment to recharge, reconnect, and acknowledge God in every path we take.
Welcome to the Primitive Camping at Bushcraft podcast. I'm your host, Chris Speir So here we're gonna talk about gear grit and the kind of stories you only get around a fire. It's all about learning, adapting and keeping your faith strong. So whether you're a seasoned outdoorsman or just looking to unplug and reconnect, you are in the right place.
So pull up a chair by the fire and let's get into it. I recently did a video of making my own freeze drive me. To take with me camping. This one happened to be chicken peas and rice with a little bit of mushrooms. So I'm going to be able to use this this weekend on a camping trip. But I also want to make some beef stroganoff.
I picked up some sour cream powder, and I want to try to see how this sour cream powder works in a meal. So I've been struggling with the noodles of the. The beef stroganoff. So I got some, some egg noodles here and I figured these will be easier when you cook these first and then once they're done, you just go ahead and throw your freeze dried stuff in there.
But I found another solution to this problem. Ready to eat pasta. Now this stuff is already cooked. It's already ready to eat. Is uh, Barilla bar. And it is a one fully cooked, one serving per container. And so this little dude right here is, let's see, it's seven ounces of actual pasta, pre-cooked pasta. So my thought is, is that I could throw my food in.
And rehydrate it with the freeze dried food, throw it in, rehydrate it, and then once it's warm, throw this in there to warm it up as well, and it'd be ready to go. So I'll carry, I'll carry two separate packages, one with the pasta and then one with my, my beef stroganoff. So let's get busy. Let's make the beef and I'll show you how I'm gonna do that.
I got my pre-made vacuum seal bags here to cut down on some time, and we're gonna use shredded beef. I don't have cube beef, but this is the Thrive Life. Oh, it's actually pretty, pretty much cube. It comes out pretty good, like chunks, so that's pretty good. So, and if you could see it from there without it falling all out.
So this is gonna work out pretty cool. This is the Thrive Live, freeze dried beef, shredded beef cooked and seasoned. So we're gonna put this into here and we're gonna make a beef stroganoff mix out of it. We also got the freeze dried mushrooms, and then we got. Sour cream powder. Now what else you're gonna need is a little bit of onion powder, a little bit of garlic powder, and then a little bit of brown gravy.
This is the McCormick Brown Gravy, and the reason I use this is because it doesn't have the MSG and a lot of other, uh, stuff that you don't need. So to start with, I'm going through. Uh, about a cup, probably a little more than a cup, probably about a cup and a half of beef in the bag, because I like a lot of meat with my food.
So here you go. We got one, and then about one and a half.
Right there. One and a half. All right, so we got that. Now we're gonna do about a half a cup of mushrooms in each.
I love mushrooms. I love food. So we're gonna do one cup. So we're gonna do about half a teaspoon of garlic powder, half a teaspoon of onion powder in each one.
All right, so now that we have that in here, we're gonna take our brown gravy and we're going to put four tablespoons of gravy inside each peg and don't have the, be exact, a little more, a little less, a lot more love.
And we're gonna do, uh, maybe two tablespoons of sour cream per bag and try that out. Remember this experiment? I've never done this before, so we're just experiment with this. So we're gonna, eh, we're gonna put three tablespoons of sour cream in there. One, two, and three. So now that we got that all done, we're gonna vacuum seal these bags, kinda stir 'em up a little bit, vacuum seal these bags, and then we're going to head out to the river.
For an overnight camping trip, and we're gonna test them out, see how well they are, especially with this ready to eat pasta. Bear with me, let's vacuum seal these dudes up. So that's what they look like after you have vacuum sealed them and ready to go. Now let's head out to the river and let's see what they taste like.
So it just filtered some water from the creek and we filled up this pot with 32 ounces of some water, and now we got the beef stroganoff that I made. Right here and we're gonna heat that water up to a bowl and we're gonna put it in there. And then I got those ready to eat Penea pastas right here. And you notice how I have two, I got two helpings for me and Dave to have dinner tonight, and we'll let you know how it goes.
So. Let's, uh, get that water on the fire. All right. We're gonna put that dude right there over that fire. I got a little grill down there, and I'm gonna leave that bale up. That way I can pick it up from right here. And once that comes to a boil, we're gonna put that other stuff in there and we're gonna be good to go.
All right, we got it to a bowl now let's get the stuff in it.
All right. Put this dude in here. Is that ready cooked pasta. Yeah, it is, uh, already cooked. It's like done. Huh? Good stuff. And one more.
Wow. Alright. So we'll just let this thicken up and then we'll be done with it.
All right, so that stuff got real thick and them noodles, they worked out perfect for this. So if you're looking for a way to add, uh, noodles without the cook time, then ready to cook noodles is amazing, and I'll put a link in the description.
It got pretty thick.
That's fire brother. Excellent. Recipe. 10 outta 10, recommend. Yep. I don't think he said that's the only thing he said since he started eating.
Yeah. That's some good stuff. Excellent. Thanks for sitting around the fire with me today. If this episode gave you something to think about, if it helped you feel a little bit more prepared or it even stirred your faith a tiny bit, go ahead and share it with someone else who might need it as well. We don't go camping to run away from life.
We come out here to slow down and recharge. So grab another law, throw it on the fire, and remember this in all your ways, acknowledge him and he will. Your path. I'll see you next time. God bless you.