Making Dehydrated Bacon For The Trail:

In my ongoing quest to continue to find methods of having low-weight/high-calorie food for the trail I recently decided to try dehydrating bacon – which is really not as easy as it sounds and really is as tedious as others have written about it being.  I thought I would share my own little adventure giving this a try.

My local store had a buy-one-get-one-free special so I bought two packets of bacon, each one pound. I got home and started cooking them up. Temptation got the best of me and I ate one piece. The rest spend about 20 minutes drying out on paper towels to help rid them of as much grease as possible, and to give my dehydrator time to build up some heat.

After cooking them all and trying to get as much grease off of them as possible I put the two pounds of bacon into the dehydrator, which took up three trays.

I set the timer on my Excalibur dehydrator at 16 hours. Every two or three hours I would pull out a tray and grab some paper towels and try to dry them off as much as possible. This is the “tedious” part of dehydrating bacon. I went to bed after about 12 hours into the cycle and when I woke up the next morning, I took out a tray and they were coated with yet another layer of grease, so I dried them all off again and threw them back into the dehydrator for another 12 hours, again drying them off every few hours.

When the timer  finally went off and the dehydrator shut off I let them sit for another hour or two. I just got a chance to pull them out and a few of the pieces had another coating of grease, but for the most part the bacon had finally dried out. Twenty eight (28) hours is the longest I have ever had anything in my dehydrator. I suspect the pieces with a bit of grease on them would probably need another 6-8 hours, and at this point I just decided to call it good and see what happens. Continue reading “Making Dehydrated Bacon For The Trail” →