Home-Dried Bean and Rice Skillet
Canned beans dried at home, crumbled to powder, and rehydrated with instant rice and sausage.
- calories
- 720
- weight
- 5.5 oz
- cal / oz
- 131
- protein
- 31 g
- serves
- 1, scales
- prep
- 2 min
- cook
- 8 min
- total time
- 10 min
- water
- 500 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
- Campfire coals
- Backpacking
- Thru-hike
- Bikepacking
- Nut free
- One pot
- Dehydrate ahead
- Shelf stable
- Basic
Ingredients
| Home-dried pinto or red beans | 3/4 cup, powdered | canned beans, rinsed, dried until they crumble, then ground |
|---|---|---|
| Instant rice | 3/4 cup | the parboiled kind that rehydrates in five minutes |
| Dry-cured andouille or summer sausage | 2 oz | shelf-stable, sliced thin at home |
| Smoked paprika | 1 tsp | |
| Garlic powder and onion powder | 1 tsp total | |
| Dried thyme and cayenne | 1/2 tsp total | |
| Bouillon | 1 cube or 1 tsp | |
| Olive oil | 1 tbsp |
Method
- Boil 500 ml of water. Drop in the bouillon, spices, and sausage slices.
- Stir in the rice and the bean powder together. The powder will clump if you dump it in dry and walk away, so keep stirring for thirty seconds.
- Cover, kill the heat, and let it sit five to eight minutes. Stir once halfway.
- Pour the oil over the top and stir it in before eating. Add a splash of hot water if it stiffens up.
Dried beans do not belong on a stove above 8,000 feet. They take an hour at sea level and longer up high, and no amount of soaking fixes the fuel math. The workaround is to do the cooking at home: drain canned beans, spread them on trays, and dry them until they snap rather than bend. Ground to a coarse powder in a blender, they rehydrate in the time instant rice needs anyway.
The powder is also what gives this body. Whole dried beans rehydrate unevenly and leave you chewing gravel; powdered beans dissolve into the water and thicken the pot into something closer to a stew. The sausage and oil carry the calories, and the spices do the rest, since bean powder on its own tastes like not much.
Packing
Beans, rice, spices, and crumbled bouillon go in one bag. Sausage rides separate. Oil in a dropper bottle.
Variations
- A foil packet of chicken instead of sausage drops the fat and keeps the protein.
- Swap the paprika and thyme for cumin and chili powder and it reads as a chili instead.
https://bushcraftusa.com/threads/dehydrated-beans.337487