Trail Cooking with Minimal Fuel

The lightest cooking fuel adds nothing to your pack weight - that is, if you don't mind gathering fire wood, making a cook fire, and tending to it while cooking your meal. But...if you're lazy like me, or you just hike until you're tired and hungry (OK that sounds more like me!), there's a good chance you prefer a simpler approach.

My backcountry cooking style is almost as simple as "set it and forget it", and I am still able to achieve an extremely lightweight kitchen. Freezer bag cooking (or FBC) is popular among backpackers because it's so easy. You simply carry your meal sized portions of dehydrated food inside quart freezer bags, pour boiling water right into the freezer bag, stir, seal, and insulate with a cozy. Then you wait for around 10 minutes and dinner is ready. But I have a way that is just as simple and uses a fraction of the fuel (not to mention the weight of all the freezer bags and the cozy!)...

Pour your dehydrated meal right into your cook pot. In this example, it's black bean soup, instant white rice, and some Delight Sauce. Add enough water to cover your meal by about half an inch, then set aside.

The lightest, most efficient fuel I've found is Esbit. I made my own titanium version of Trail Design's Gram Cracker Esbit stove. Their little 0.10oz stove is great, but since the Esbit fuel turns to liquid while burning, it runs down and fills the deep grooves with fuel which becomes solid when it cools. This creates additional work for you to scrape off the residue before you can disassemble and store the stove. My one piece design eliminates the grooves and almost never needs cleaning. I store it in a tiny MYOG cuben fiber sack to keep the dirty little stove away from everything else in my kitchen.

Esbit can be a little difficult to light, but there are tricks to making it easier. A few drops of denatured alcohol lights it very quickly, but if you're using Esbit, you're probably not carrying alcohol. I've even tried alcohol hand sanitizer, which works OK, but I don't tend to carry it either. My favorite method is to take my tiny pocket knife and scrape a small groove into the top of the cube at one end, creating a small pile of powder on the top. This Esbit powder ends up being relatively easy to light with your mini bic.

By now your meal has already begun rehydrating and it's time to get it cooking...

Bring it to just a boil, stir, cover, and blow out the flame. Let it stand for about 5 minutes to finish "cooking". As compared to bringing water to a rolling boil (for FBC cooking), this method takes about half the time, which of course uses less fuel.

After cooking a dinner for two, I typically end up with around half of my Esbit fuel cube left. My experience is we use less than one Esbit fuel cube (0.5oz) per day for two people, making a hot breakfast and dinner each day. This is about as close as you can get to carrying no fuel with the added bonus of not having to tend to a wood fire the entire time you are preparing your meal.

My Trail Designs 1.3 liter Sidewinder Ti-Tri stove leaves me the option to use it as a wood burning stove, which I have as a backup to Esbit. That way I don't need to carry any extra "just in case" fuel.