Freezer-Stash Pasta, Trail Version
Precooked pasta dried at home, so dinner is a five-minute soak instead of a long boil.
- calories
- 720
- weight
- 5.5 oz
- cal / oz
- 131
- protein
- 26 g
- serves
- 1, scales
- prep
- 10 min
- cook
- 6 min
- total time
- 16 min
- water
- 400 ml boiled
- cost
- $
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Canister stove
- Alcohol / Esbit
- Backpacking
- Bikepacking
- Basecamp
- Canoe / raft
- Vegetarian
- One pot
- Dehydrate ahead
- Shelf stable
- Dump and stir
Ingredients
| Small dry pasta | 3 oz dry | shells, elbows, or broken spaghetti |
|---|---|---|
| Olive oil | 1 tbsp | half at home, half in camp |
| Dried tomato sauce or powdered marinara | 1/3 cup | |
| Grated parmesan, the shelf-stable kind | 3 tbsp | |
| Dried vegetables | 1/4 cup | bell pepper, onion, mushroom |
| Salt and black pepper | to taste | |
| Red pepper flakes | 1/2 tsp | optional |
Method
- At home: boil the pasta two minutes short of the box time, rinse it cold until it stops steaming, and toss it with half the oil.
- Spread it in one layer on dehydrator trays or a sheet pan. A single layer matters or it fuses into a brick. Dry at 135F for 6 to 8 hours until the pieces are hard and rattle.
- Bag the dried pasta with the sauce powder, dried vegetables, parmesan, and seasoning.
- In camp: boil 400 ml of water, dump the bag in, stir once, and pull it off the heat.
- Cover and wait five minutes. Stir, add the rest of the oil, and add a splash more water if it is still chewy.
The source of this one is a home-freezer trick: precook pasta, rinse it, oil it, and stash it so a later dinner is fast. There is no freezer on trail, so the storage step becomes a dehydrator. The rest of the logic survives intact. Undercooking by two minutes and rinsing cold stops the starch before it turns to paste, and the oil keeps the pieces from welding together while they dry.
Dried precooked pasta rehydrates in about five minutes off the heat, against eight to ten minutes of active boiling for raw pasta. That is most of a canister’s worth of fuel saved over a week, and no pot of starchy water to dump. Sauce powder and parmesan go in the same bag because they thicken whatever water the pasta does not absorb, which is what keeps this from being noodles in a puddle.
Packing
One quart freezer bag per serving holds everything dry. Oil goes in a leakproof dropper bottle, never loose in the food bag.
Variations
- A foil packet of tuna or chicken stirred in at the end takes it past 40 g of protein.
- Swap the tomato powder for powdered cheese sauce and a spoonful of milk powder.
- Skip the parmesan and use nutritional yeast to keep it vegan.
https://dontwastethecrumbs.com/how-to-freeze-cooked-pasta