Food Identification and Basic Backcountry Cooking
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Basic Cooking and Food Identification
Good cooking has a positive effect on health, safety and enjoyment of the wilderness. Being able to prepare an edible and nutritious meal allows students to keep pace with mental and physical challenges of a 30-day wilderness expedition.
Educational Goals
The goal of early cooking instruction is to make tasty and nutritious meals quickly and efficiently. Later in the course, your instruction can address baking and more involved meal preparation. All students must be able to prepare simple meals be themselves be the end of the first ration period.
Key Points
Organization
An organized kitchen simplifies cooking and makes preparation a meal enjoyable. Place the ingredients, utensils and cooking equipment you will need within reach. Put them away when you’re done. Clean up as soon as meals end.
Hygiene
Good hygiene helps prevent food-borne illness. Washing your hands before handling food is critical. Do not share personal utensils or allow them to come into contact with communal foods. Utensils should be sterilized routinely with boiling water.
Clean pots and dishes after every meal to eliminate food-borne illness. Bacteria and their toxic by-products grow quickly on food residue. Scrub the pot with hot water and a natural abrasive like sand or pine needles. Starches dissolve best in cold water. Strain wash water away from camp and pack any remnants from the strainer into a garbage bag. Rinse with hot water. Do not scrub Teflon coated fry pans with sand or gravel. These items can be cleaned be scraping the pan with a spatula and using hot water to cut the grease. Let clean pots dry in the sun, a blast of U.V. helps viral and bacterial populations down.
Food Identification
Basic food identification classes include preparation guidelines for all the items in our food bags. Most of our dinner and breakfast foods are simply boiled, but students may need help determining proportions, water amounts, and cooking times.
Cheese and margarine enhance the taste, texture and caloric value of a meal. Both items must be stored in the shade to slow down spoilage. To avoid bacterial contamination, do not touch cheese with your hands.
White powders are the most confusing item found in our food bags. Show your students how to tell the difference between them: milk squeaks, cheese cake has two different grain sizes, flour is quiet and smooth, baking powder is fizzy to the tongue, and potato pearls are yellowish and granular. The bulk of the other powders found in our ration are drink mixes and desserts.
Soup bases are concentrated and salty. They can be used to flavor sauces, make a broth and provide flavoring. Spicing is personal: respect the tastes of others. Conserve spices be cooking them into the food. They need to be soaked in boiling water prior to cooing to re-hydrate. Save trail foods for the trail when it is not practical to stop and cook.
Basic cooking
Water boils at 212 degrees F at sea level. Giardia and most other water borne pathogens are killed at 140 degrees F, so when small bubbles – or “fish eyes” – appear, the water is safe to drink. In high altitudes, the effect of altitude on boiling point is not significant enough to require a rolling bubble for disinfection.
Helpful Hints For New Cooks
• Keep heat low and make sure there’s plenty of grease or water in the pot to avoid burning food. You cannot mask the taste of burned food!
• Make sure you start cooking pasta in boiling water, rice can be thrown into cold.
• Add milk products after food is cooked and stir constantly to prevent burning.
• Mix powders with liquid separately to avoid lumps.
• Melt cheese be adding a few drops of water and covering the pan to create steam.
• Rice is a “2:1” mixture meaning two parts rice to one part water. Add ingredients to cold water with a little salt and butter. Cover until boiling. Then reduce to a very low simmer for 20 minutes without opening lid too much. You should have perfect rice. One cup of rice feeds two hungry people.
Knife Wounds
Knife Cuts can be a common camp injury. Cuts to the fingers and hands often take a long time to heal and are difficult to keep clean during an active course. Demonstrate and model cutting away from the body and not towards or against body parts.
Teaching Considerations
Introduce a relaxed attitude toward food on the first day of the course to minimize the potential for food stress. Encourage all students to try their hand in the kitchen. Instructor eating preferences should be kept to ones self. Cooking and food identification can be taught to the whole course or to smaller groups. If you decide to work with individual tent groups, get the instructors together and agree on key points before splitting up, or gather together as a group after the meal and have everyone share tricks they learned about outdoor cooking. Inviting tent groups over to the instructors’ kitchen or having an instructor eat out are other ways to provide cooking tutorials.
Emphasize fuel conservation and hygiene throughout the course. Course banquets are enjoyable when everyone is committed to preparing food hygienically, but they have a reputation for sending food-borne illnesses raging through camp. Wait until students have demonstrated good habits before introducing the idea of a banquet.
Leadership Opportunities
Promote teamwork in the kitchen and encourage students to be open about what they want. Sometimes good teamwork is leaving the cook alone, other items it means fetching water or cutting cheese. The critical leadership point is that the cook needs to tell people if they do or don’t want help, and the entire tent group should be willing to pitch in and do their share around the kitchen.
