Discover efficient gluten-free meal prep tips for multi-day hikes, including my experience preparing for the Rob Roy Way adventure.
Mastering Gluten-Free Meal Prep for Extended Hiking Adventures
This article reflects on an 8-day hike along the Rob Roy Way, focusing on the packing strategies employed to minimize weight and space while adhering to a gluten-free diet. The hike involved careful preparation to ensure that meals were not only lightweight but also calorie-dense, allowing for sustained energy throughout the journey. The hiker utilized a combination of protein shakes, porridge oat bars, meal replacement bars, and thermos-prepared dinners, which included options like pot noodles and curry, supplemented with protein sources such as jerky and cheese.
Throughout the trek, the planning included strategically timed pit stops for meals and designated restock points. The packing strategy involved carrying foods that were low in water weight but high in calories, ensuring that there was always sufficient nutrition available. The hiker noted that they often had leftovers and were rarely left feeling hungry. This approach allowed for efficient packing, with daily meal components easily accessible in waist pouches, while the remaining food was designated for evening meals, optimizing both convenience and energy management on the trail.
Mastering the Art of Nourishment: Crafting Gluten-Free Feasts for the Trail
Hey folks just a a quick intro here so um I’ve put together a short video for the food prep that we’ve done for the roboy way so this is our method of doing long hike uh multi-night multi-night hike Foods um so there’s a few rules that were kind of Gone by with it so one it needs to be compact so we’re wanting to.
Get as much energy as possible out of what we’ve got two I was on a restricted diet so what I’m going to show you I think for the most part it’s gluten-free um always check the labels before you go by um and we want it to be tasty and stuff that we kind of enjoy eatings and and finally cheap um we weren’t willing to.
Pay like 789 pound each per meal for like um like wayers or any of the we didn’t want to cough up like 7 eight n pound each for likes of a fire pot meal or a wayes meal or anything like that convenient as they are they are not compact for what we were wanting to do and we could make dinner for about a p50 each which was mostly the same.
Thing and much more convenient one of the most useful things that we had for this hike was Theros so these they add about 500 G to the pack maybe a little bit more but they helped us cut down on what we needed to take so we didn’t actually need to carry as much other weight and.
They made things cheaper and it meant that we could make overnight oats it meant that we could make our evening carb pots which were just just add water and then use the thermos and it it lets it soak in the thermos which was made it quite Pleasant and then just add in the bits you want like we had cheese we had jerky um all all in all the food that we.
Had and took with us just really Pleasant and I enjoyed so without further Ado I’ll cut to the tabletop video of me shuffling around bits of food uh at some point I’ll look to update for something that’s a bit better quality um hopefully a bit clearer this is bit thrown together I’m going to stop waffling thank you for watching.
Enjoy all right hello there I wanted to give a quick walk through of how we been doing the food for our multi-night hikes so I come with it in my robber way video a little bit but let me go a bit more detail what we do is we carry a bag like this for each day Mark the night that we’re having it and it will contain the dinner for that.
Night and what we tend to do for the evenings is we keep it simple we’ve not been using the boil and the bag meals or uh the expensive ready meals cuz they’re expensive um but we will get there to trying out at some point what I tend to do is take something like like this um so a curry pot type thing or um cat sometimes uses like pot noodles or.
Superer noodles and that sort of thing um decant it into a bag add 200 M of water to this and you have your carb portion for the evening and we have it with some protein a bit of jerky Maybe cheese and some crackers um I can’t think of any night where I actually ate that much when we.
On the multi night hikes don’t have a huge appetite a lot of the day um and then for Hing I’ll have something like this so point to make uh when was doing the Rob Roy way I was on a restricted diet so I was trying to avoid wheat um as much as I could so the stuff which we’ got here tends to be wheat free um since then okay okay.
Listened off a bit but I do get gastroparesis with the stress and the physical exercise and crappy diet so I need to be quite careful on these walks because that’s something I’ve had to cancel hikes for in the past if you’ve seen my o video you’ll see what I mean so enti bag we will have dinner hot chocolate for before bed or.
Maybe some whiskey um depends on how we feel and then we’ll have breakfast for the next morning so often enough for that I will have are you helping Diego the way yes you go I will have something like this so I’ll take one of these porridge bars and it’ll do me for breakfast it’s it’s.
Quite tasty it’s easy to eat and quite Pleasant one of the things the cat swears by which I’ve had on twice and I’m not quite as on but I have had and it is really helped with my energy levels in the morning is we’ll have some of this uh Earth champ plant protein protein.
Shake we’ll take this we will add in about 50 g of Blended up oats we’ll pop it into a third which I’ll get out in a second and show and we just leave overnight cold water leave overnight crack open in the morning and you have uh whatever level of thickness you want protein.
Shake with the oats that gives it a nice hit of energy and it’s it’s easy to drink it’s filling it gives you a good protein hit good energy hit and it just a fantastic way to start the day then we have a coffee at our first pit stop along our walk and that’s it we’ll have um we’ll have trail mix for during the.
Day um we will take something like take some crisps push up into a bag and scrunch it up and you can eat that with a spoon so you can have dirty hands and you still have ation um yeah that’s that’s about it we have the trail mix so this is one that cat this is one of cats cuz she never.
Went through much of a trail mix on the Rob Rob Roy warehous In fairness we didn’t use much of what we took but um trail mix tends to be we’ll have like chocolate raisins we’ll have a variety of nuts um we quite like the um we quite like the forest Feast covered fruits so this is this is this is an almond we’ve got dates covered in Fruit we got.
Cherries dates covered dates covered in chocolate we’ve cherries covered in chocolate got pineapple covered in chocolate so there just lots of little ways just to get the nutritional hit which you kind of lack with the rest of the meals in the trail mix in an easy to eat eat Manner and it gives a good a good hit of.
A good hit of energy and that t bit we’ll have we’ll have breakfast we’ll have dinner at camp and through the day we’ll have our trail mix we’ll maybe have some more jerky maybe another dose of this depends on what you want and but that all packs up quite quite.
Neatly into the the overnight bag so let’s uh show you what I mean so we’ll have the next day’s trail mix which will be think 100 125 G portion bag that go in that gets pulled out at camp and you and we put that into our bum bag which is under our waste so we have easy access to it during the day um we’ll have our our coffee for in the.
Morning we will have our old bar goes in I won’t open the box cuz I’m being lazy I’ll maybe do a better this video at some point this is just a a quick run through um so we’ll we’ll get we we will wake up in the morning bag will have coffee it will have the breakfast bar or we’ll have a.
Thermos on the side with a protein shake um Trail Mex goes into our pouch the night before and then when we get to camp in the evening we have everything else CR in the bum bag everything else in here I like to carry a little bit of dark chocolate as.
Well is that that P there that’s about I think that’s about 250 200 g let’s let’s throw this on scale find it shall we yep pardon pardon it it’s a bit Mucky 600 G okay well that that that that contains about um 200 g of excess.
Trail mix so that sounds about right 400 G I think we had about 2 and 1 12 kg of food on the r right where we had we had eight nights sorry seven nights um we didn’t need put for every night or for every day because we stopped quite often to have like Pub lunches or.
Breakfasts um one night we’re in the bed and breakfast um so we had a day spare and when we finished it we basically had about two days worth of food left so I think next time we do that sort of thing I’ll just make sure we have a couple of light things that are spare just remembering one of the things.
That I have as well is a t like a NRA Valley protein bar um which goes in and that is what I have for lunch it’s basically like a meal replacement bar sometimes it’s just a protein bar like a grenade bar or one of the better ones um cat’s not particular keen on them um if we passing somewhere like a shop then it’s it’s something you don’t have to.
Carry on you plan your hikes accordingly and make sure you know where the restock points are plan to restock make sure you’ve got a backup like we carry a spare cardb pot type thing whe carry spare jerky so you basically got energy you got protein just basically the basics that will keep you going if.
You end up stuck out for an extra day or two stranded somewhere the say you pack your fears we definitely packed more food than we needed but this being our first long distance hike we’ve done two or three nights in the past we didn’t need to prep this efficiently because we didn’t need to worry so much about our bag of.
Space in this case about a third of our bag was taken up with our food supplies and we still packed too much our restock points meant that we could have packed a lot less we just didn’t know what sorts of things we’ be able to pick up and pack this is all stuff that you can relatively easily get at a lot of um smaller Super Market type shops that you.
Can find in some of the villages you might pass through and you just top up you tend to people get jerky tend to people a to get chocolate coffee oat cakes um all that kind of thing if you like take some fruit one of the things that we one of the rules that we followed when packing was we wanted to have.
I think it was I’ll double check this and I’ll put up something like 400 calories per 100 gam of food because the primary thing that we needed was the energy to keep us going after that we wanted to make sure we had enough protein to repair and replenish um muscle uh we wanted to make sure we had nutrition which goes into the the.
Trail mix for the most part and through that we had a decent balance we didn’t feel like we were lacking anything um over that over that window of time if you’re doing a longer hike you might want to pay more attention to some of the macro nutrients but it’s easy enough to get fresh fruit on the hike depending on the.
Time of year so we foraged blackberries we foraged plums we foraged raspberries there could be apples um if you’re particularly good at forging you might find some other bits and pieces but those tend to be quite easy to come across and you just have a handful of bum fruit portion for the day fantastic okay I’m going to wrap this up.
There I hope you find this useful if you think you would do any of this differently or you have your own methods you think would be improv improved on this fire in the comments I would love to know um like And subscribe for more content I am going to try and get some more and better quality videos some where this is a bit.
Shy and I’d love to know more all right thanks for watching
