Dehydrated Cold-Soak Ancient Grains Salad
This delicious salad is nutritious, easy and convenient: just add cold water about three hours before lunch, keep hiking, and then enjoy with a view!
Delicious and nutritious!
Salads are a delicious addition to the backpacking menu, but salad vegies on their own aren’t enough fuel for multiday hikes. However, this salad is packed with slow-release carbs from spelt, pearl barley and quinoa, with lentils and freeze-dried cheese adding protein. At the same time, it retains that light and zesty taste so different from other rehydrated meals — yum!
We’ve suggested this as a lunch, but it works equally well as a dinner - just increase portion sizes. And no need to be too fussed about exact proportions, other than retaining the lentils for protein. You can also swap out grains for freekah, farro, bulgar, brown or wild rice… whatever you like or have at hand, really. I prefer the small puy (aka French) lentils or black lentils to red or brown because they better hold their shape and texture. And white rice tends to be a bit soft for a rehydrated salad.
Reader Meg asks about eating this hot and though we suspect it won’t translate well due to the acidic dressing, the grains make a perfect base for all kinds of other dishes. For example, instead of the cucumber, go Middle Eastern with half a diced butternut pumpkin plus two eggplant sauteed in scant oil with your favourite Moroccan spices (Ras-El-Hanout, Bharat, or your own mix of cloves, allspice, cinnamon, cardamon etc). Add a little water, braise, then mix through grains and dehydrate immediately. You could toast some pine nuts and package them separately like the cheese for some crunch.
Or you could go traditional with celery, carrots, peas, and a tomato base — that could be yummy too! Or Mediterranean with capsicum, tomato, eggplant. On trail, rehydrate with boiling water as for any other hot recipe. The possibilities are endless, but here are the instructions for that cool salad:
Ingredients (makes approx. 10-12 lunch serves)
Fresh ingredients
For our suggested serving size of 70g/2.5oz with 5g/0.18oz freeze dried cheese and 1/2 tbspn olive oil (oil and cheese added in camp), total calories per serve is 510 (2135 kJ) with 20g/0.71oz protein. Each serve should require around 275ml/9.3oz of water for rehydration. Add an extra 1/2 tbspn of olive oil to bring the calories to 590. Tweak serving sizes to your appetite.
The following amount suits dehydrating in a 9-tray Excalibur dehydrator.
2 cups puy lentils
1.5 cups spelt
1.5 cups pearl barley
1 cup quinoa
2 large red onions finely diced
5 tomatoes diced into 8mm cubes
2 large cucumbers deseeded and diced into 8mm cubes
50-70g/1.8-2.5oz freeze-dried feta
Dressing*:
6 cloves garlic, crushed
juice and zest of 3 large lemons
3 tspn black pepper
8-10 birdseye chillies or to taste (optional)
1/2 cup mirin
2 tbspn red wine vinegar
2 tbspn aged balsalmic vinegar
1 tbspn dijon mustard
1-2 tbspn caster sugar or honey
1-2 tbspn salt or to taste
pepper
olive oil (added in camp).
*if you have a favourite dressing recipe, you can use it, but omit the oil and avoid mayonnaise (high in fat and contains egg unsuitable for dehydration).
Method
First cook all the grains, separately because they have different cooking times. Cook until al dente:
Preheat oven to 200C/400F. Spread the quinoa on a baking tray and roast for 5-10 minutes, checking regularly until they smell nutty. Rinse well in a sieve under running water and then simmer in 1.5 cups water in a covered pot until water is absorbed, usually about 10-15 minutes. Stand 10 minutes, fluff with a fork and allow to cool. Place in a very large non-reactive bowl.
Meanwhile, add spelt, barley and lentils to separate pots, cover with double the amount of water and simmer until cooked (30- 45 minutes for the spelt and barley, 15 minutes for the lentils). They should be chewy but not tough, nor soft and mushy: overcooking will turn them to porridge when rehydrated on the track. Drain and add to bowl with the quinoa.
While the grains are cooking, mix dressing ingredients in a large screw-top jar. The dressing should have a pronounced sweet-sour-salty flavour profile.
Add dressing to the grains while they are still warm and mix well. Add the diced onions and mix again. Once cool, add the chopped vegetables. Mix well, taste and adjust seasoning: I like a tangy dressing but you may prefer more salt or sugar. The salad should taste just a little too strong now, to make up for the loss of flavour that happens when dehydrating.
Cover with cling wrap and place in refrigerator overnight for flavours to meld. In the morning, mix well, taste again, and adjust seasonings a second time if necessary.
Dehydrating
Place one serving size in a bowl and weigh: a little under 400g/14oz each was right for us, but you may prefer a larger or smaller helping. This is your 1 SERVE WET WEIGHT A. Spread this serve onto a mesh dehydrator tray and mark with a teaspoon. Spread remaining salad onto trays. Place a silicone sheet or baking paper on the very bottom tray to catch the drying quinoa that falls through the mesh in the trays above.
Dehydrate at 52°C (125°F) until grains are crispy and onion/tomato are leathery, breaking up clumps several times and rotating/swapping trays to allow for even drying. Pull out the lined bottom tray whilst doing this, so you don’t lose all your quinoa onto the floor!
Once dry, weigh the dry salad on your marked tray (ours was 97g/3.4oz). This is your 1 SERVE DRY WEIGHT B. Tip this and all remaining dried salad, plus the quinoa from the bottom tray, into a large bowl.
Packaging for Two
If storing for a time before use, use vac seal bags to maintain maximum flavour. However, if using soon, you can package into ziplocs, or even a single large bag and rehydrate individual serves in a soaking jar on the track. But we will assume you’ll be storing your salad for a time so:
Into each vac seal bag place 2 x DRY WEIGHT B (or 1 x DRY WEIGHT B if packaging for one).
Weigh out 10 -15g/0.35 - 0.53oz of freeze dried cheese and place into a folded piece of greaseproof paper or small mylar sachet. The cheese adds extra tang, protein and umami; vegans can use nutritional yeast.
Place one sachet into each vac seal bag. Par-vac and seal. Vaccing too tightly can cause the grain to puncture the bag. Label with date, description and amount of water to add ie 2 (WET WEIGHT A- DRY WEIGHT B). For our two serves it’s 2(400-97g/14.1-3.4oz) or about 600ml/20.3oz; if packaging for one, it’s simply WET WEIGHT A - DRY WEIGHT B.
Store in a cool dry place for up to 3 months. If storing for a longer time, place in freezer to minimise flavour loss.
Rehydrating On Trail
About 3 hours before lunch (or dinner), open your bag and remove the cheese sachet. Add the specified amount of water and re-seal. We use these : they seal very well but, when rehydrating inside our packs, we always put rehydrating foods into a second large ziploc in case an ingredient has punctured the vac-seal bag. Other hikers use screw-top plastic jars. In hot weather, we prefer not to rehydrate in the outside pocket of the pack: the middle of the pack is cooler.
At lunch time, open bag, mix through 1 tbspn or to taste of olive oil (for two serves), divvy up, sprinkle over cheese and enjoy!
Cheat’s Clever Hacks
These mixed grains come prepackaged in Asian supermarkets, but they may not reconstitute well: choose one without glutinous rice and make a little test batch first because, as a salad, it may become claggy once cooked.
Buy pre-mixed ancient grains (google for your local area) which can be cooked together, but we recommend you still cook the lentils separately. You can also find microwaveable ones that are fine to eat cold, but they aren’t dehydrated so are heavy to carry, and you’ll still need to dehydrate your salad veg.
Buy a fat free salad dressing instead of making up your own. Mix garlic and chillies with salad before adding dressing.
We used freeze dried feta but any freeze dried cheese is fine, or fresh hard cheese if you are carrying it.
Geoff enjoying a cool salad on a warm day! Yum!
