In this episode of the Primitive Camping and Bushcraft Podcast, Chris Speir dives into the essentials of food preparation and management for primitive camping. Learn about various methods such as dehydrating, freeze-drying, and procuring food in the wild, alongside handy recipes and tips to enhance your outdoor culinary experience.
Welcome and Introduction
Importance of Food in Camping
Types of Camping Food
Dehydrated Food
Freeze-Dried Food
Just Add Water (JAW) Foods
Pre-Packaged Foods
Edible Essentials
Procured Food
Additional Tips
Conclusion
Welcome back to the Primitive Camping and
Bushcraft Podcast. My name is Chris Speir
and I'm going to be your guide to
enjoying the great outdoors.
How do you prepare your food before you
head out into the woods?
Do you bring just freeze dry? Do you
bring just add water?
Do you bring dehydrated?
Do you bring canned or
pre-packaged or prepared foods?
Or do you procure your food once you get
to your camping location?
Hmm, I do a little bit of all that. But
today we're going to go ahead and break
now food as discussed here in the book,
Primitive Camping and Bushcraft.
You can pick up a copy of this book on
Amazon right now for like 16 bucks.
And once you get your copy, go ahead and
head over to Facebook and join the
Facebook group,
Primitive Camping and Bushcraft.
You don't have to have a copy of the book
to join the group, but you can just go
ahead and join the group if you want.
So let's dive right on in. Alright, so
what is one of the
main concerns about food?
You have to have food
in order to have energy.
And we're going to discuss how food is
crucial to maintaining energy levels,
especially during physically demanding
activities like rock climbing, canoeing,
hiking, swimming, you
know, stuff like that.
You have to have a lot of calories. You
have to have more calories
when you're in the woods.
And you're going to expend more calories
while you're out there.
You're going to be more physically active
while you're out in the great outdoors
than you are if you're at, say, home.
Some people, that's not true, but a lot
of people there are.
So when you're planning to travel several
miles into the woods, food becomes a
major consideration.
And the reason why it does
is because food is heavy.
And food is also... you have to have it.
You have to have food, and it's heavy.
But it's one of those things that you
have to make sacrifices for because you
have to have it with you.
Now, when I was in the military, I ate
more MREs than I ever cared to remember.
But the thing about the MREs is that they
had 2,000 calories per package.
If you ate everything in there, you had
over 2,000 calories and it
increased your caloric intake.
So when you're in a situation where
you're expending a lot of calories,
you're going to have to
be able to replenish them.
Even though I ate so much when I was out
in the desert, I still lost a lot of
weight because I was constantly active.
I was constantly doing stuff.
And so I would eat two
and three MREs a day.
That was 6,000 calories a day, and I was
still losing weight, and it was crazy.
But one of the things about food is that
when you get down on a hiking trip or
you're doing some
kind of primitive camping
or you're heading out into the woods, you
find you a nice spot five miles away,
and you got your hammock set up and you
got a nice little
stream where you're fishing,
you'll be surprised at how
quickly your energy gets zapped.
And I got a couple of true stories that
I'm going to go through
here in a little while,
but your energy levels will get used up
extremely quickly when you're doing any
kind of primitive camping or outdoor
activities like that.
But instead of explaining why you need
food, let's explore how to ensure that
you have enough whenever
you get out into the woods.
So we're going to talk about
a couple of different things.
There's different types of camping food
that you can have with you.
And I listed it all in the book on page
183, and we're talking
about dehydrated food.
Dehydrating removes all the moisture from
the food, and it uses extremely low heat
to dry your food out.
Then you have freeze-dried foods, and
then you have just to have water foods,
and then you have pre-packaged foods.
And we're going to go over all these just
a little bit more in depth as we go.
But then you have procured food.
And so when you dehydrate your own food,
the first thing that comes to
everybody's mind is beef jerky.
I mean, beef jerky is dehydrated meat.
And you could take an animal that you
procured in the woods and turn it into
beef jerky, cut it in thin
strips, set it out in the sun,
let the sun remove all the moisture out
of the meat, and still eat
it, and it'd still be good.
A lot of people are like,
"I ain't doing all that."
Well, that's how they did it for hundreds
and thousands of years before we got used
to going to the store and picking it up.
And dehydrated food
is not just beef jerky.
And I use the dehydrator
before I head out into the woods.
If I know I'm going on a camping trip for
a couple of days, four or five days or
something like that, beforehand, I will
run that dehydrator.
I'll dehydrate vegetables. I'll dehydrate
some beef jerky. I'll dehydrate some
eggs. I'll dehydrate...
And all that's listed in the book here.
But I dehydrate so much stuff that...
And then I bring my own foods with me,
and I use my dehydrator like crazy.
You can even take old leftovers and
dehydrate them and then put
them in a vacuum-sealed bag
and then throw it in the
freezer until you're ready to go.
Once it's dehydrated, it's good for
several days, but it's just like keeping
it in the freezer to keep it real good
until you're ready to
depart from your trip.
But you could dehydrate stews. You could
dehydrate anything. You
could dehydrate applesauce.
You could dehydrate
spaghetti, chili, beef stew.
I've even dehydrated tomato paste.
Sounds silly, but I made tomato powder
out of it, and it's good stuff whenever
you get out into the woods.
But dehydrated chili is pretty good.
The only problem with dehydrating
anything like that is that if it has a
very high fat content,
that fat is actually going to cause it to
go rancid a little bit quicker.
So you've got to be pretty quick on those
homemade dehydrated meals because they'll
go bad a lot sooner than the other stuff.
Now, one of my favorite things to do with
a dehydrator is besides beef jerky.
I mean, I make some beef jerky like crazy
every time I go out, but one of my
favorite things to do is vegetables.
You could do tomatoes. You could do
squash. You could do zucchini, onions,
mushrooms, and I do all those.
For example, with the squash, I like to
take a squash and
zucchini and cut them things up,
lay them out on the dehydrator with a
little salt and pepper.
And then once they're completely
dehydrated, you have 100% healthy chips.
Like they have the same
consistency as a potato chip.
And you can snack on them when you get
into the woods or you can throw them in
some of your stews or your
food and stuff like that,
reconstitute them and have
a more healthy of a meal.
My favorite chip is the tomato chip.
Whenever you dehydrate, you cut a tomato
about an eighth of an inch thick, throw
it into a dehydrator,
and once it gets crispy, it retains the
flavor, but it is like over exaggerated.
I don't know how to explain it. It's just
very zesty. It's very with
a little salt and pepper.
A tomato chip is amazing.
You would never go back to store-bought
stuff if you tried these things.
And I do it all the time. I dehydrate
these things constantly.
And it's crazy, but when you're
dehydrating different things like onions
and chips and mushrooms and
all these different items,
you can make so much different foods when
you're in the woods.
And plus, you can add them to different
foods and stuff like that.
So we're going to get a
little deeper into this as we go.
So freeze-drive foods is next.
Freeze-drive foods, what happens is they
put it in a freeze-drying unit,
which these things are extremely
expensive. I'd love to get one, but it's
out of reach for most people.
And you're talking about
$3,000 to $5,000 for a small unit.
But very handy. They're extremely handy.
But freeze-drive foods, what it does is
it freezes it and it lets it thaw out as
it vacuums all the
moisture out of the food.
And eventually, there's no more moisture
in the food and the
food is completely dry.
It is completely shelf-stable.
And they do this all the time. Right now,
a real popular item for freeze-drying is
like Skittles and
candies and stuff like that.
You go to street fairs and you see
freeze-dried candies and freeze-dried
chocolate and freeze-dried ice cream.
And all that's pretty cool.
But when you're going into the woods, if
you're looking for a
lightweight way to do it, you don't...
Freeze-dried is the way to go. It is the
lightest option of any food because it's
going to take out all the moisture,
all the weight and everything.
Even here in the book, I put in an
example how an 8-pound roast, once you
cut it up, slice it up, freeze-dry it,
is going to be less than a pound.
And that same roast, once you dehydrate,
is going to be about 3 pounds.
So for those of you that are watching the
video, I have here in my little hands, I
have the Thrive Life.
This one is broccoli. This is
freeze-dried broccoli.
And if you watch any of my videos on
YouTube, I do these all the time.
Right here we got, I don't even know what
that is, butternut squash.
And I got butternut squash right here.
And then I got a big old
container of chopped spinach.
I love some spinach.
Spinach is good for you.
Spinach actually is
extremely healthy for you.
It has a lot of calcium, iron, potassium,
vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D.
It is extremely good for you.
And true story, this is weird, but heart
palpitations, if you
suffer from heart palpitations,
spinach will
extremely help that condition.
Now, freeze-dried, I did a video here
recently where I made
my own freeze-dried meal.
And I took these canisters that I just
demonstrated for
those watching the video.
I have little canisters full of different
variations of freeze-dried stuff.
And I would open these up and I would add
half a cup to a vacuum seal bag.
And I would add
certain ingredients to it.
And then I would add rice, a parboiled,
not parboiled, but the instant rice.
And then I would make
my own freeze-dried meal.
And these meals were large enough to
where you could feed two people.
And it's extremely
cost-effective to do it that way.
It's more cost-effective than it is to go
into the store and
buy you a, let's say, a
mountain house or one
of them other brands.
And it's more cost-effective.
Now, it's expensive up front, but in the
long run, you save
money because your meals
are going to be cheaper.
So if you're actually constantly out in
the woods and you're
going camping, like, let's
say, three times a month or more, just if
you go camping more
than the average person,
then buying the bulk stuff
is going to be the way to go.
So now we're moving on
to just add water meals.
And as you can tell in the name, just add
water means exactly what it means.
Just add water.
And everybody knows that you can get the
instant mashed potatoes.
You can get chicken and rice, chicken and
broccoli, rice arone,
or chicken and broccoli
rice, or jalapeno and something, noodles.
And all you have to do,
everything's in one bag.
You just heat up some water, add the bag
to the water, and then
a couple minutes later,
voila, you got you a nice little meal.
Now, with that, you can add some
freeze-dried meats to
it or stuff like that.
You can always add stuff to it.
And freeze-dried stuff goes real well
with just that water stuff.
Now, the thing about just that water is
that it's real convenient
and it's readily available.
You can go to the Dollar General, you can
go to Dollar Tree,
Walmart, any of these big
stores, and you can find just that water
products right there on
their grocery shelves for 95
cents or a dollar.
And you could, like, for instance, one of
the things that I love
is the Idaho and baby
Reds, the mashed potatoes,
and those things are good.
And you could throw them dudes in your
backpack and have a meal
just off of the potatoes.
The beautiful thing about potatoes is
that it's going to be a
very high caloric intake
and it's going to be a
very satisfying meal.
You can add stuff to it, but you can't
take away, but you can
add stuff to it and add more
and just add more flavor, add more food
items into it, more
protein or anything like that.
But, you know, just add water foods, like
baby red mashed potatoes, and
that's my personal favorite.
But these, you know, chicken flavored
rice, jalapeno and cheddar
pastaroni, and stuff like that,
all these foods are about a dollar.
And one of my favorite ones is going to
be the Hungry Jack hash brown potatoes.
You know, Hungry Jack hash brown potatoes
comes in like the old school
milk garden it looked like.
And these dudes right there are, most
people use them for breakfast, but you
can add them to a soup.
You can make a soup out of those.
You can make, you can thicken
up a stew with the potatoes.
You boil the potatoes down
and the starches come on.
All they are is they're par-balled and
then they are dehydrated.
And the reason they do that is because if
you dehydrated a regular
potato, it tastes horrible.
I've tried it, but you have to par-ball
it and boil the potato and
then dehydrate the potato.
And that's what they do.
So, you know, just add water.
Meals are easily available.
They're very lightweight and they are
very quick to prepare.
But now we're going to look
at the pre-packaged foods.
Now, what I was talking about whenever I
was saying pre-packaged
foods in the book is that
I'm talking about summer sauces,
tortillas, energy bars, sardines, you
know, stuff like that.
They're tasty.
They have their pros.
They have their cons.
You know, they're a little bit heavier.
But they also have nutritional value that
you're going to need
to help keep your energy
levels up while you're out there.
For instance, one of my...
You will always find this on me whenever
I go camping is summer sauces.
Summer sauces is an excellent
pre-packaged food because it
don't need to be refrigerated.
It does not weigh a lot.
You can get a one pound summer sausage
and you can eat on that for
several days in the woods.
And I often eat summer sauces for
breakfast with my eggs and
then I add it to my beans.
Or, you know, I always have beans and
rice when we want to go in there.
One, because it gives you all your
proteins and your carbs in there.
And it's very...it
refills your energy levels.
And another thing, adding the summer
sauces to the beans and the rice is just
like...that's how you do it.
You know, I'm from South Mississippi.
You have to have a meet in
with your beans and rice.
Tortillas, you know, tortillas are easy
to take with you and
they're very lightweight.
So you could put them into a vacuum seal
bag and they last forever.
And they're lightweight and
you can eat on whatever meal.
You can have some sort of bread with you
for every meal and add
them carbs that you need.
Give you that boost of
energy that you need.
And those tortillas are real easily
packable and they go
with almost everything.
Now, sardines, Spam, Vienna sauces and
other canned meats may be
appealing for various reasons.
But the major downside to these items is
that they weigh a lot.
Now, depending on how far you go in the
woods, you know, you're not going to want
to bring a case of
Vienna sausage with you
because after four miles in the woods, a
case of Vienna sauces is going to feel
like it weighs 5,000 pounds.
And that's not what you want when you're
heading into the woods.
So prepackaged foods is...that's the only
downsize to them is the weight.
Edible essentials is going to be like
your dried beans, instant rice, let's
see, peanut butter, stuff like that.
Drink packets, instant coffees, green
teas, powder milk, shortening.
And Crisco makes, when we're talking
about shortening, Crisco makes little
bars that look like a stick of butter,
but it's actually shortening.
You just cut it off, throw it in the pot
and you can fry a mushroom, fry a fish,
fry a mouse, whatever
it is that you call.
But versatile items are great for any
primitive camper looking to make a
variety of meals while
you're out in the woods.
These dry beans are extremely versatile.
You can use dry beans and, you know, you
could bring a one pound bag of dry beans
and eat on it two or three times while
you're in the woods mixed with some rice.
Instant rice is approximately half the
weight of regular parboiled rice.
So the instant rice in the box or minute
rice in the box, it's extremely
lightweight, it's very
effective, and it feeds you.
You know, during World War II, the
majority of the Pacific Islands, the
Pacific Campaign,
that's all they had was rice.
And, you know, well, if you watch the
movie, rice and maggots, but, you know,
one of the things that you can bring with
you that I do constantly
is Lipton onion soup mix. That stuff is
amazing. You can flavor anything with it.
You can make a soup with it.
It's a seasoning for anything that you
want to make. If you if you procured
yourself a raccoon or, you know, a possum
or something like that,
Lipton onion soup mix will make that
thing taste more like
home. Stuff like that.
Now, one of the things that I brought
with me or usually bring with me is a
very small jar of peanut butter.
Two reasons. One is that you can use it
for bait. And if you're trapping and
you're trying to catch little critters to
eat, you can use it for bait.
One of the reasons I do is that it is
extremely dense in vitamins and minerals.
And it is one of those things that if you
did that, if you were zapped and you
opened the peanut butter
and you ate that peanut butter in a
couple of minutes, you would feel brand
new. You'd feel totally different.
One of the I remember a camping trip my
brother and I took with peanut butter and
we were fishing and I brought a little
thing of peanut butter and it was two
days of catching nothing.
And, you know, over the course of six
days, we couldn't catch any fish, you
know, and over we were eating our beans
and we were trying to
procure as much food as we could.
And it was just, you know, it was a six
day trip and we just were exhausted. And
I can remember sitting down. The food was
running out and we were so weak and
tired, headaches dehydrated probably.
And I brought a small jar of peanut
butter with me and I opened it up and I
just started eating. And in just a few
minutes, I felt like a brand new person.
I mean, I don't know if it was all the
sugars, peanut butter's got the sugars
and proteins and all the vitamins and
minerals and stuff in there.
But it is an awesome camping food. And if
you match, if you use the peanut butter
with the tortillas, you can have your
peanut butter sandwich.
You know, you got your carbs, you got
your proteins and everything in there and
you can just really boost yourself up,
give you that extra energy that you need
while you're out there in the woods.
So instant coffee, green teas, those
little things, you know, they are real
good at keeping the headaches away. If
you're a constant caffeine drinker and
then you head out into the woods and you
don't have any caffeine, you're going to
get a caffeine withdrawal headache and
the coffees and the teas will
actually help mitigate that.
And one last quick staple here would be
powdered milk. Powdered milk combined
with a couple of other ingredients will
allow you to make biscuits.
You know, it will help you. You can cream
your coffee, different
various different things.
Powdered milk is a versatile item to have
with you when you head into the woods and
it's just, you know, it's great to have
with you and it's real lightweight and
it's just easy to bring and to have.
Now procuring your food, hunting, fishing
and foraging. And I talk about it in
here. Like right now, chanterelle
mushrooms are growing all over the place.
You know, puffball mushrooms here in
South Mississippi are starting to pop up.
Oyster mushrooms should be popping up
because they pop up
throughout the year here.
And, you know, but be extremely careful
when it comes to mushrooms because
mushrooms, there's thousands and
thousands of poisonous ones and there's
only a couple of hundred of edibles.
So you want to be extremely careful. I'm
not giving you any advice on which
mushrooms to eat. You know, being a
podcast, you can't see anything.
But mushrooms are not, if you know what
you're doing, mushrooms are an awesome
way to augment your food.
If you don't know, if you've never done
it before, just get
some education or training.
I don't even recommend buying a book at
first because there's so
many lookalikes out there.
I did go buy a book and then I had a
friend that showed me which
ones we could and could not.
And that's what really helped. Now
there's one mushroom out
there that you cannot mistake it.
And it is some places is outlawed to
touch, but here in Mississippi it is not.
But the lion's made mushroom typically
grows in the wintertime,
fall, winter, early spring.
And that is an extremely dense mushroom.
You can eat on it for a long time and
it's actually very good for you.
Little critters like
squirrels, rats, mice.
And I had a camping trip one time where I
ate a mouse and I posted
it on the Facebook group.
And everybody's like, no, you didn't. And
I was like, yeah, I did. And
I was like, you're disgusting.
I was like, it's just a mouse, dude. It's
just mouse. It tastes
like squirrel, but softer.
It wasn't as chewy.
Freeze-drive foods are easy, convenient,
and very lightweight. And you can make
anything that you want with them.
Pre-packaged foods are pretty cool
because they're already
made, but they're heavy.
Summer sausages, sardines, spam,
tortillas, energy bars, stuff like that.
We went over to dry beans.
We went over instant rice.
And additional little essentials that we
talked about was a Lipton onion soup mix,
some peanut butter, some
drink packets, and green teas.
Now, I didn't discuss this, but one of
the items that you can make when you're
in the woods is pine needle tea.
Pine needle tea has a natural source of
vitamin C and it's
going to give you a boost.
It's going to help you from getting sick.
It boosts your immune
system while you're in the woods.
And it just helps keep you refreshed.
Now, to make that, you're
going to find pine needles.
Don't use you or Long Island North Folk
pine or something like that, or you pine.
Everything is in here in the book.
Virginia pine and white pine are
particularly good for this.
You can use loblolly pine,
longleaf pine, stuff like that.
But, you know, Virginia pine and white
pine are particularly good.
And you want to get an inch diameter of
leaf clusters and then
you want to cut those up.
Bring some water to a boil, take it off
the heat, throw the leaves in
the water, and then cover it.
Let it sit for about 10 to 15 minutes
until you take the lid off and all the
leaves are on the bottom
and they turn like a lime green color.
Then just filter them out and
drink the tea and that's it.
If you got a little honey with you or you
found some honey when you're in the
woods, then you're good to go.
And you can sweeten it up a little bit.
Sweetened pine needle tea that has been
sweetened with honey is amazing.
And it really is. And
plus it's real good for you.
You know, honey's got a natural antibody.
And then you got the pine needle tea,
which is a natural vitamin C.
So you're good to go for that.
All right. We did the seasonings. Oh,
seasonings. Let's go over seasons.
Now, one of the things about seasonings
is, let me see here.
One of the things about seasonings is
that you can bring your favorite
seasonings that you want with you.
You know, staples are salt and pepper,
but I love Tony Sachery's Creole mix.
And or, you know, if it's not Tony
Sachery's Adiran's Creole seasoning or
something to that effect.
And I put them in a different bottles, a
little bit of travel bottles at Walmart.
You get for like 80 cents. You can fill
those dudes up and then you can just
sprinkle them on your
food and they're lightweight.
And you can bring a little bit with you.
You can bring a lot with you.
And then so seasonings are extremely
helpful out into the woods, especially a
little bit of salt, a
little bit of pepper.
If that's all you got, salt and pepper
makes everything makes
the world of difference.
All right. So I think
that's it for today.
We've got all the way up to here. The
next section is going to be cooking and
we're going to talk about cooking in our
next one and just explain
what cooking is here in the book.
And then we will have been through each
section of this book. And then now we're
going to turn around and we're going to
just break it down right now.
We did a 30,000 foot over you fly over.
And then now we're going to look into it
and just spend time in each
chapter going over each section.
So just talk about experiences and stuff
like that and then just talk
about what I mean about it.
So if you haven't had a chance to pick up
the book, primitive camping and
bushcraft, go ahead right now.
It's on sale on Amazon for like 16 bucks.
You can pick it up on any major online
retailer and go ahead and join the
Facebook group,
primitive camping and bushcraft.
And I guess, you know, I'll see you in
the next video or the next podcast. God
bless you. Have a great day.