At the Cycle Touring Festival in 2019, we ran a camp stove cookery session. We asked participants to contribute their recipe ideas and tips. Here are the tips people contributed. The next blog post will be the recipes.
1. Carry small pots with some or all of the following in (Nalgene make good leak-proof pots): salt & pepper, spices, oil, washing up liquid.
2. Vegetables cook more quickly if you peel them into strips or grate them before adding to the pan.
3. Save fuel and free up your stove by using haybox cookery methods. Bring a pan of water to the boil, add rice or pasta and take off the heat. Insulate the pan – we put it in our Ortlieb washing up bowl filled with grass, leaves and covered with a sleeping bag. Leave for half an hour or so until cooked.
4. Boil in the bag rice is quick to cook, and doesn’t need to be cooked in the bag. Similarly, pouches of microwaveable rice can be heated in a pan with a small amount of water, and are much quicker to cook than normal rice.
5. Soak quinoa or lentils in a sealed container throughout the day, ready to heat through in the evening. This reduces the cooking time considerably.
6. Miso soup sachets, or other instant soups, are a good choice when you stop pedalling in the evening, to rehydrate and replace salt lost through sweating.
7. A pot scraper tool is useful for cleaning pans with a small amount of water. GSI make one.
8. Nutritional yeast flakes (available from health food stores) provide light weight nutrition.
9. Before a ride, or on rest days, prepare energy bars using a mixture of dates, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds and other dried fruit/seeds/nuts.
10. You are unlikely to have scales on the road so weigh ingredients out at home before you leave and store in sandwich bags. Or use your mug as a measuring device – learn approximately how many grams/ounces of different ingredients it takes.
11. Tahini sauce can be carried in a tube. Dilute with water to form a nutritious, tasty sauce.
12. Dried ingredients are long lasting and lightweight. More unusual options include peanut butter powder, coconut milk powder (add spice for a quick curry), dried onions, garlic granules and dried porcini mushrooms.
13. Egg white powder (made by Dr Oetker, sold in the cake decorating section of Hobbycraft) can be used to make passable pancakes. Add to plain flour, bicarbonate of soda and milk powder for a pancake mix that you can carry with you, that doesn’t rely on fresh eggs.
14. For a cooking knife that’s better than relying on a penknife/multi-tool, try Opinel. They make excellent folding knives.