Food For Hiking

Simple, light weight food to keep you going on your hiking adventure.

When planning our hiking trips my number one planning thought is how can we reduce weight, and food for hiking is a big part of weight reduction.

The number one rule to remember is liquid foods are heavier than dried, that’s why hiking and camping stores have all that expensive freeze dried food. Also you want carb rich food such as pasta or noodles to provide energy to keep you going.

Photo by Tony

One strategy for us is we use the heavier meals first, for example on our last hiking trip we emptied a jar of pasta sauce into a snap lock bag and then put it in the freezer. Then on our first night we used this meal up and saved the lighter foods for later in the trip.

Here is a list of hiking food:

Breakfast

• Muesli
• Powdered milk
• Porridge

Morning Tea / Afternoon Tea

• Muesli Bars
• Chocolate Bars
• Assorted Tea Bags / Coffee Sachets
• Nuts and Dried Fruit

Lunch

• 2 minute noodles
• Cheese Slices
• Bread rolls (freeze enough for each day before you go)
• Large Muesli bars
• Instant Soup

Dinner

• Packet pasta
• Brocolli (very easy to chop on the fly and drop into your pasta or noodles)
• Freeze dried peas
• Instant Noodles
• Chocolate Block

You don’t need to spend a fortune on special purpose made food for hiking. Go to your local supermarket and look for items that are light weight, dried and healthy. Although the great thing about hiking is because you are burning calories all the time you can pretty much eat anything and not put any extra weight on.

 

Amazon Hiking Food

Here are some products we’ve found on Amazon to give you some further ideas.

Even though it's great to keep your pack weight down, remember to plan for extra days if the route you've chosen takes a bit longer, even if it's just some extra noodles.