When fresh food is unavailable or expensive, dehydrated options can help. Learn what to try and what to skip.
Links:
Harmony house dehydrated food (Amazon)
Legacy dehydrated food (Amazon)
Prefer to read? Check out Provisioning with Dehydrated Food.
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Music: “Slow Down” by Yvette Craig
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Carolyn Shearlock has lived aboard full-time for 17 years, splitting her time between a Tayana 37 monohull and a Gemini 105 catamaran. She’s cruised over 14,000 miles, from Pacific Mexico and Central America to Florida and the Bahamas, gaining firsthand experience with the joys and challenges of life on the water.
Through The Boat Galley, Carolyn has helped thousands of people explore, prepare for, and enjoy life afloat. She shares her expertise as an instructor at Cruisers University, in leading boating publications, and through her bestselling book, The Boat Galley Cookbook. She is passionate about helping others embark on their liveaboard journey—making life on the water simpler, safer, and more enjoyable.
Dave Skolnick (S/V Auspicious) says
Good presentation.
Dehydrated foods have good application for the scenarios Carolyn described. In short, for inland cruising, coastal cruising, minor excursions off the beaten path they do well. I have very real reservations about being dependent on them for passagemakers. Admittedly we’re a small proportion of the larger cruising community.
If your water gets contaminated, or you have small tanks and are dependent on a watermaker that fails, dependence on dehydrated foods can turn an inconvenience into a crisis. With commercial or home canned products and even frozen goods the liquid can mean the difference between short water rations and calling for help.
At sea lots of things can go wrong. If you have a spillover fridge/freezer a single failure can lead to short term weight gain as you eat as much as you can followed by hardship. Separate fridge and freezer have much merit for passagemakers. Watermakers are second only to generators as a source of trouble offshore according to ARC reporting.
Places like the out islands of the Bahamas may feel remote but realistically you aren’t more than a day or two from a source of fresh water if you have a problem and there is little risk of being dependent on dehydrated foods. They can be really attractive to increase diversity of your provisioning and extend your planned (as long as nothing goes wrong) cruise. Halfway across the Pacific is a different matter.
That is not to say that dehydrated foods have no place offshore. For example while you can certainly get common button mushrooms in cans, and you can home can some things like marinated mushrooms. If you have broader tastes you only have two or three days from shop to tossing overboard for more exotic mushrooms. Properly dried you can have sauteed Shiitake mushrooms over your (frozen) steak weeks after you drop lines. Kiwi fruit, apricots, plums dry well. Even high-fat fruits like avocado can be dried. It isn’t hard.
For most root vegetables (potatoes, onions, carrots) fresh product keeps a tremendously long time when stored properly. Some fruits last a long time including apples and oranges. Look up ethylene gas when choosing storage.
I can wholeheartedly recommend Carolyn’s book “Storing Food Without Refrigeration” (https://products.theboatgalley.com/products/storing-food-without-refrigeration). Even if you have refrigeration it provides food (ha!) for thought about storage. Buy it for yourself for Christmas!