For the 2025 guiding season we’re looking for a new breakfast and dinner recipe.
The two winners will get to take our “Plan Like a Pro” online course,an 8-week comprehensive trip planning curriculum.
Most importantly though, they will become immortal backcountry chefs, whose meals will be savored by hundreds of starved backpackers for years to come!
How to enter
- To submit a recipe, complete this form, and
- The deadline is Sunday, February 16
The form will collect your name and email, which will not be sold or added to our newsletter; and then asks for either a link to the recipe(s) or text with ingredients and preparation/packaging instructions.
Recipe ideas left as comments won’t make the cut.
You can submit up to two recipes (a breakfast and a dinner, or two breakfasts, or two dinners), so send us only your best.
How to win
In general, we are looking for recipes that are:
- -REALLY tasty;
- -Made of easily available ingredients (locally or online);
- -Calorically dense, by having fats and no/little water;
- -Mostly shelf-stable, for up to several months;
- -Vegetarian, or easily made vegetarian; Extra Credit: It can be vegan also
- -Allergy-friendly, or at least accommodating of allergies (peanuts/gluten, etc) with simple ingredient substitutions; and,
- -Reasonably economical, but not cheap.
Oils, sauces, butter, and/or cheese are acceptable ingredients — and perhaps even encouraged. Many of our other meals include them, so we’re familiar with packaging, carrying, and distributing them.
Finally, these new meals should be DIFFERENT from our existing breakfasts and dinners. For example, we would be more interested in a mac-and-cheese dish than a beans-and-rice dish, since we already have one of those.
Questions? Leave a comment below!
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Your meals look unappetizing… like glop in a pot
Sez the guy who packs his skillet
That’s heresy! Watch out, because UL Jerk will be coming for you.
Question: Is a meal made with fresh ingredients that is then dehydrated a contender, or do you prefer something that is assembled with already dried/stable ingredients?
It’s impractical for us to dehydrate food, because of the volumes/amounts involved. So long as we could source the dehydrated ingredients, though, we could work with that. We could also (and will likely have to) re-engineer most meal submissions so that they suit our systems.
Coffee, oatmeal, walnuts, almonds, raisins.
Spam sliced and fried in a pan.
Pancakes, “Pearl Milling, complete” (no egg)
Syrup.
After the first backpack trip with 2 sons complete with poison oak and bears I was surprised when they asked where we were going backpacking the next summer. Yes this all took some time.
We use bear kegs now and haven’t seen any bears.
Will you share the recipes you collect?
That wasn’t included in the fine print of the contest, so we’ll have to talk about it internally.