Pasta and Tuna with Home-Dried Vegetables
Small pasta, a foil packet of tuna, and carrots you dried yourself. Built around one pot of water.
- calories
- 760
- weight
- 6.5 oz
- cal / oz
- 117
- protein
- 42 g
- serves
- 1, scales
- prep
- 5 min
- cook
- 12 min
- total time
- 17 min
- water
- 450 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
- Liquid fuel
- Backpacking
- Thru-hike
- Bikepacking
- Basecamp
- Nut free
- One pot
- Dehydrate ahead
- Shelf stable
- Basic
Ingredients
| Small dry pasta | 2 oz | orzo, ditalini, or broken angel hair — thin shapes cook fastest |
|---|---|---|
| Home-dried carrot coins | 1/4 cup | sliced thin, dried until they snap |
| Home-dried bell pepper or zucchini | 2 tbsp | |
| Foil-packet tuna | 1 packet (2.6 oz) | |
| Grated hard parmesan | 2 tbsp | the dry shelf kind, not fresh |
| Olive oil | 1 tbsp | dropper bottle |
| Dried garlic, oregano, black pepper, salt | 1 tsp total |
Method
- Drop the dried vegetables into 450 ml of cold water in the pot and let them sit while you set up the stove. Ten minutes of soaking saves fuel later.
- Bring it to a boil, then add the pasta and the seasoning. Stir often — thin pasta in shallow water sticks to the bottom fast.
- Cook until the pasta is soft and most of the water is gone, about eight minutes. Add a splash more water if it goes dry early.
- Kill the heat. Stir in the tuna, oil, and parmesan. Cover for two minutes, then eat out of the pot.
Store-bought freeze-dried dinners are light and expensive and taste like a compromise. Drying your own vegetables costs almost nothing and lets you decide how much salt goes in. Water is the only thing that lets bacteria and mold work, so vegetables dried until they are genuinely brittle keep for months in a sealed jar.
The method matters more than the ingredient list. Rehydrating the carrots in the pot water before it boils means they finish at the same time as the pasta, and cooking the pasta in the water you plan to eat keeps the starch — that starch plus the oil and cheese is what makes this a sauce rather than wet noodles. Tuna goes in off the heat because boiling it just makes it stringy.
Packing
Dry the vegetables at home at 55 °C until they are brittle, not leathery, then vacuum-seal or jar them cool and dark. Pasta, vegetables, cheese, and seasoning go into one bag per dinner. The tuna packet rides separately.
Variations
- Swap the tuna for a foil packet of salmon or chicken.
- Dried tomato powder stirred in at the end turns the sauce red and adds body.
- No stove: cold-soak the pasta and vegetables for two hours, then add the tuna and oil. It will be chewy but it works.
https://wolgast.no/en/dehydrating-food