Isle Royale Forums

Does anyone know of a source for good dehydrated bulk food? We had been using adventurefoods.com but they are apparently not in business anymore. We prefer to stay away from the pre-packaged foods and make our own fare.

You can find an amazing amount of prepackaged foods at the local grocery store. Lipton makes noodle and rice dishes that you can add chicken, tuna or beef to. Sure beats buying freeze dried. Don't worry about the sodium or calories, you'll be burning these up on the trail. You don't have to make anything fancy either, you're only there a week. Treat yourself to a nice steak dinner on the way home.

Check your local food co-op (health food store...). Ours has bulk dehydrated refried beans, 3 different kinds of soup, falafel mix, etc.

Keweenaw wrote:Check your local food co-op (health food store...). Ours has bulk dehydrated refried beans, 3 different kinds of soup, falafel mix, etc.

Thanks... I think we can find most everything there and the grocery store. The one item we're struggling with is dried cheese. One of our favorite trail breakfasts is spicy cheese grits, and we like to increase the protein content with dried cheese (the cheese-flavored stuff doesn't cut it). We'll taste-test this with shelf-stable parmesan.

Don_P wrote:One of our favorite trail breakfasts is spicy cheese grits.

Speaking from experience, bring your grits with you. They're hard to find up there! Spent a whole week once w/o my grits 'cause I decided to provision in Duluth.

FWIW, my vegetarian daughter announced last year that she wanted to go to IR with me. That was the good news. The bad news is that she objected to almost all the ingredients that were in my 20+ packages of freeze dried food. So, I bought a dehydrator and spent the better part of January through April making recipes, dehydrating them, and trying them out at home.

Bottom line was that I never used any of the Mountain House, Alpine Aire, or Backpacker Pantry stuff (it is still in my basement). And, we ate pretty good. When we ran into JohnH and Trish, we combined our dinners for some wonderful potlucks.

We did eat well!!!

johnhens wrote:We did eat well!!!

And I learned a valuable lesson. When JohnH is eating out of his trough, don't touch it. I darn near lost a finger!!!!