View Full Version : Going stoveless...
I am not much of a cook at home. I really don't like to cook when it is hot and I'm tired. This said, I don't think that I'm going to want to fire up the stove every night, cook and clean up. Maybe I'm lazy but if I don't do it at home after a day behind the desk then I know I'm not going to after a day under the pack. I looked for threads on going stoveless so not to start a redundant thread and didn't find one.
I'm hiking SOBO starting mid June. I know that around October I will probably need hot food just to help with body temp but I want to go stoveless until then. I don't however want to eat 'junk food' all the time. Anyone have ideas for stoveless meals other than peanutbutter sandwiches and pouch tuna/chicken? Anybody here thruhike stoveless or know someone who did?
All responses will be appreciated!
Thanks,
Amazonwoman:sun
Jim Adams
11-03-2006, 11:25
Don't know whether he is on here or not but Mr. Parkay of 2006 sent his stove home in Georgia and finished w/o cooking.
geek
StarLyte
11-03-2006, 11:32
Somewhere in the middle of Stumpknocker's thru this year he left his stove at home, said he was only using it to perk coffee.
Butch Cassidy
11-03-2006, 12:27
Hi, I hiked a lot with Senor NO BS in 05 and he went stoveless and in the hotter parts a lot of days I didn't cook at all. More food weight is somewhat offset by no stove or fuel but you are going to find stove or no stove it takes a lot of imagination to keep from eating the same stuff day in and day out. I like to cook so I had a lot of different meals planned. Senor NOBS did comment that the best trail meals he had were my leftovers. See Ya uptrail
i usually don't carry a stove in the hotter months. lots of tortillas and bagles.
Starting out, (MArch, April) You will find that you VERY MUCH want a stove. I find that even waking up, and having a cold breakfast, those first few weeks, when your getting into your daily routine for the first time, you will want a hot supper. Perhaps even more, on the cold rainy days there is nothing more than a HOT DRINK to get you going again :)
Come May, you may opt to send the stove home, depending on how your daily routine works out. BUT KNOW THAT EARLY on, you will surley want a hot source. The JetBoil is excellent! Lighweight, 2 cups boil in @ 80 sec. ENJOY!
Don't let those stovers and shoddies fool ya. You don't need a stove, even in cold months. I hiked about 1400 miles stoveless and it was fine. I now hike stoveless, but build a fire some evenings.
Cooked food tends to be cheaper and lighter than cold foods, so you don't really save much weight going cold.
-dirtnap
hot meals are awfully nice, but a lot of people do without. i hiked with a guy that ate straight bars for two months - candy bars, granola bars, packs of crackers.
cleanup is not that bad. try using the rubber tip of a small spatula to scrape out all the bits of food, then just throw the pot in your food bag. it'd be good to wash it every few weeks, but whatever... you boil most of the germs away.
Yes, the weight may be a little lighter.. WHAT!?!? HALF a pound!?! Hot food to cook tens to be much lighter than bread, snack bars, peanut butter, ect. You can certainley get by w/o a stove, but.. for a FIRST TIME HIKER, i highly reccomend taking a lightweight one , esp starting FEB/MAR/APR
hmm, something tells me Solace was a NOBO. I guess Solace missed the part about Amazonwoman going SOBO and leaving mid June.
max patch
11-03-2006, 15:38
Its personal preference - you can go stoveless if you want to.
I mailed my stove ahead 3 weeks when I reached CT. Didn't think it would be that big a sacrifice as I only used it for dinner. I was glad when I caught up to it. YMMV
I hiked raw this year ( food) but had a stove just in case, and it came in handy for tea during the last few days....so cold I broke down and used it - glad I had it along!
I might carry a pot and a couple of backup/emergency cook meals along with something to drink hot just in case. I've been reading and have seen some people say you can soak some pastas and eat them cold and mashed potatoes. Of course I'll try them at home before I hit the trail.
Keep the ideas coming kids! Y'all are the best!
Amazonwoman (a rebel without a stove...)
Skidsteer
11-03-2006, 18:40
I might carry a pot and a couple of backup/emergency cook meals along with something to drink hot just in case. I've been reading and have seen some people say you can soak some pastas and eat them cold and mashed potatoes. Of course I'll try them at home before I hit the trail.
Keep the ideas coming kids! Y'all are the best!
Amazonwoman (a rebel without a stove...)
If you want to carry a pot and stove as a backup only then you probably want the lightest combo you can get.
Hog On Ice's Heineken pot-tea candle stove system is extremely light. I tried to link to it but the site seems to be down or removed. Maybe HOI will see this thread and chime in.
I haven't thru-hiked the AT, but I did hike the length of the Superior Hiking Trail this year, did it without a stove, and didn't think it was a hardship at all. Some trail foods I had good luck with: energy bars (I like Cliff Bars, but you can switch around for variety), nuts, fruit (dried apricots, raisins, figs -- the raisins and figs are particulary nice because they keep for a long time because they don't require refrigeration), and crackers like Trisquits and Wheat Thins. And with the exception of the figs, these are foods you can usually get your hands on even at small convenience stores. In addition, I also mixed up batches of protein, complex carbohydrates and gatorade, all in powdered form, before the hike. Just add water on the trail. Good calories per ounce numbers on the powdered drinks. The drawback to this, though, is that it's sometimes difficult to get these powders on trail so would likely require mail drops. If only one or two of these foods strike your fancy you are getting lots of other suggestions so you should be able to come up with a pretty good list suited to your tastes.
I think the benefit of a hot meal or drink is mostly psychological, even in cold weather, and since you already often do without a hot meal at home (like me) I don't think this would be much of a barrier for you. Just think -- polar bears survive in frigid temps without eating a hot meal their entire lives:D .
I have been considering any advantages of this thread from my perspective and I found it lacking-for me, at least.
I just added up from my spreadsheet those items I take for cooking:
Fuel bottle & 8 oz. avdp denatured alcohol .55 Lb
MSR Titan kettle .85L .27 Lb
Potted Meat (cat) stove & 3/4 wind shield .05 Lb
Titanium folding spoon .03 Lb
Total weight carried/cooking .90 Lb or 14.4 ounces
With the above cooking paraphernalia I can wander for 7 1/2 days heating 2 pints (16 fl oz) water each morning and 2 pints each evening for a nice pleasant, pleasing hot breakfast and dinner each day-all for just 14.4 ounces...well under one pound 'toted'... Now if i were going to do an unsupported sprint of the JMT, which I am vaguely considering, I might consider it
:D
I am not much of a cook at home. I really don't like to cook when it is hot and I'm tired. This said, I don't think that I'm going to want to fire up the stove every night, cook and clean up. Maybe I'm lazy but if I don't do it at home after a day behind the desk then I know I'm not going to after a day under the pack. I looked for threads on going stoveless so not to start a redundant thread and didn't find one.
I'm hiking SOBO starting mid June. I know that around October I will probably need hot food just to help with body temp but I want to go stoveless until then. I don't however want to eat 'junk food' all the time. Anyone have ideas for stoveless meals other than peanutbutter sandwiches and pouch tuna/chicken? Anybody here thruhike stoveless or know someone who did?
All responses will be appreciated!
Thanks,
Amazonwoman:sun
At first I felt the "stoveless" thing was ludicrous, but the more I think about it, I see its really not. In fact, its really a viable option for saving a fair amount of weight and eliminating the cooking chore. While I have not gone stoveless, I once went quite a few days cooking little to nothing, as I had altitude sickness, did not want a full pot of food I knew i couldnt eat, & instead forced down small amounts of food down during the day and evening. I survived, obviously.
I dont think hot food helps much with controlling one's body temperature either, assuming you mean to warm it. Putting any food into the body generates internal heat from the body's process of metabolizing it so, while if the food consumed is hot it does helps some, its quite overshadowed by the body's own metabilizing process, whether the food is hot or cold. Like if you are trying to warm up while shivering in a sleeping bag, a fast way (other than to keep shivering, which is involuntary, anyway) is to gulp down any food and let your internal heater work too, to begin putting body heat into the bag.
So, going stoveless may not be such a bad idea after all, just somewhat unconventional-foregoing the comfort(heating) part of the food cycle. I guess if you had too, you could even reconstitute (while hiking, long before the meal)some of the dried foods we usually take stoves for, in a screw-on plastic jar of the type that Rock once espoused taking, a Crystal-lite jar, as I recall, then eat it cold (or body-heat warm, depending on where you carried it.) Anyway, in the heat of summer it wouldnt be much effort at all, I dont imagine.
So, to answer your original question, one product I have found is "whey protein" powder. Body builders use it to bulk up (my son). I mixed up some with powdered milk and its quite tasty. A 27 g. scoop yields 20 g protein but it is high in fat (zero trans fat) and cholesterol, which would be a problem for some section hikers but not so much for thruhikers. For them it would seem to be a great way to keep the weight up.
Just my 2 cents on a thought provoking thread
Other than peanut butter out of the jar, one might use cold water to reconstitute grains like tabouli and cous cous, both of which can be eaten cold, too. It just might take longer to reconstitute them than if you had used boiling water. Tabouli and cous cous are found in most large supermarkets that I have seen.
Then there are packages of flour tortillas. Some of them have a shelf life longer than one month. I wonder how it would be smeared with peanut butter?
Other than peanut butter out of the jar, one might use cold water to reconstitute grains like tabouli and cous cous, both of which can be eaten cold, too. It just might take longer to reconstitute them than if you had used boiling water. Tabouli and cous cous are found in most large supermarkets that I have seen.
Then there are packages of flour tortillas. Some of them have a shelf life longer than one month. I wonder how it would be smeared with peanut butter?
Tortilla wraps are the best. PB, Nutella and honey or PB, honey and rasins, PB and apple slices wrapped up......
Bags of chicken mixed with mayo packets, curry powder and apples or bell peppers, or mix with BBQ sauce packets, served on wraps.
Lots to do!
floyd242
11-16-2006, 14:15
Canned refried beans transferred to ziplock
Pouches of chicken or tuna or something
Shredded cheddar
Taco Bell sauce
Tortillas
Burritos for days!
Okie Dokie
11-16-2006, 15:07
In my opinion it boils down (no pun intended) to what you want to eat...on my thru I spent about $960 on maildrop food before even walking a step of the AT...before I even got out of Georgia I came to the conclusion that I had wasted half of that $960, because some of the foods I had selected became nauseatingly repugnant to me when eaten every third day--Citadel Spread and Tuna Mac spring to mind, uggghhh...what I would do if I were considering going stoveless on a thru is to work up a 2 or 3-week menu of "cold" foods that I thought I would either enjoy, or at least be able to tolerate, long-term and eat that diet exclusively at home for 2 or 3 weeks to see if I could ''stomach'' it, over and over and over...I would treat myself to maybe 3 restaurant dinners per week during the experiment, to simulate ''town meals''...I sort of wish I'd done this before hitting the AT even though I cooked 1/2 my breakfasts, no lunches, and all my suppers...from my experience the less spicey a food was the better candidate it turned out to be in terms of repetition in the menu...I ate between 190-200 boxes of mac-n-cheese on my thru and never got tired of it...I ate mac-n-cheese mixed with tuna only 3 times and was done with it!...I met one guy on my thru who was going stoveless...when I offered him a bowl of my Lipton Noodle Dinner he lost no time in throwing his damp Grahm Cracker/Peanut Butter sandwich into the fire...I could do a thru with cold food if I had to, but I don't think I'd want to...
berninbush
11-16-2006, 15:12
Amazonwoman,
Reading your first post carefully, it looks like your concern is more with the work of cooking and cleaning up than with weight. Is that right?
Click the link in Sarbar's signature (in her post above!) if you want to know about freezer bag cooking. If you decide you don't want to forgo hot meals entirely, this option might appeal to you! "Cooking" is a matter of boiling water, and there's no cleanup.