Rehydrating your dehydrated camping food

Dehydrated food saves weight while backpacking, these are the best stoves for cooking your dehydrated camping food

Ideal as adventure fuel or even as an emergency meal at work, our selection of dehydrated and wet (pre-cooked) foods prove that trail food doesn't have to be bland or unhealthy.

Whether you have chosen a pre-cooked food such as Adventure Nutrition or a weight saving freeze-dried option such as Firepot, all you need is a simple heat source to transform it into a nutritious, tasty food.

How to prepare your dehydrated food
Requiring only water to cook, dehydrated foods are ready in 5-15 minutes and depending on the brand can be heated in either a pan or in the pouch. The convenience of a pouch is that you have less dirty pots to wash up. It is worth noting that most of this time your food is left standing, so that's good for your fuel supply and means you can get on with some chores.

How to prepare your wet pre-cooked food
Place in a pan of boiling water for 6 to 8 minutes, then eat from the pouch, saving yourself some washing up! Because they're pre-cooked, they can be eaten even if your matches get wet, your lighter runs out or your stove splutters it's last shuddering breath.

Boiling water
All our stoves boil water. Let's run through some of the pros and cons of each of our units.

Bruler
Our little meths burner - who doesn't get all nostalgic following the slightly antiquated process of toping up the reservoir with that pungent purple fluid? It takes me right back to cooking on DofE expeditions. It's a little bit heavy, but it's reliable, gentle and satisfying. It is never going to boil your water as fast as a pressurised gas stove, but with a good windshield you should be tucking into your main before your mates have finished their desert.

Kraku
So small, so lightweight, it is a miracle it can still kick out 2600 watts of brute power. Kraku is our smallest backpacking stove is ideal for the independent traveller who wants to boil water fast. The arms are not that big so you are probably going to be rehydrating your food in one of our titanium cooking mugs. A MytiMug 400 will give you enough hot water to make up an Extreme Food main but falls just shy of the 420 ml required for a Firepot meal. A lot of people go big and choose the MytiMug 650. You can fit a gas canister in it and have enough capacity to rehydrate 2 packets of Extreme food, or a Firepot and a cuppa while you wait for it to cook.

Koro
Based on a design for Everest expeditions this is the mountaineering ready stove you would take to rehydrate your expedition food. Stable and efficient thanks to the preheat tube, it has 2800 watts to boil water faster so you can eat faster and get tucked up in your sleeping bag sooner. The wider arms mean you can use a larger pot, boil more water, handy if you have found a friend to eat with.

Brukit
We love the convenience of the Brukit all-in-one camping stove and it is incredibly good at boiling water. With the built in Piezo ignitor you don't even need to be rubbing sticks to get it going. It's no slouch either, with an output of 1500 watts and a neat heat exchanger you will be steaming in no time. The large 1000 ml pot will boil enough water for a couple of Extreme Food mains with enough left over for a cheeky brew for the chef.

If that has whetted your appetite check out our full menu of dehydrated camping meals, and by the way, if you need anything to eat your meal with we can help you out there as well.

Buon appetito!