Home Made Pre cooked vaccum packed meals

Andrea

I cook up a few stews, freeze them in Chinese take away dishes, once frozen I bung into vac bags, vac and seal, no messy defrosts just cut the bag open and reheat, great time saver

Stu

Hi Andrea

We prepared our meals for our Simpson Desert trip last year (3 weeks) and will also do the same for our trip to Cape York this year
(5 weeks) We found by having the vegies already prepared
it was a great time saver we also took meat with no bones,steaks, sausages, hamburgers, chicken fillets, lamb steaks, all the food
was vacuum sealed in meal size, no food scraps means a lot less
rubbish, we don't prepare meals like stews, lasagne or pasta as
we always camp out and don't have enough room in the fridge
for anything like that.

Hey - I say do what your comfy with. You can over prepare. Our thing is getting excited about camp cooking every night - it's part of the experience.
Happy travels
Cheers
Jason

X2 what stu said,
when we went on a 5 week trip up the cape we precooked heaps of meals before going. mainly it was stews and the like, we put them in tupperware containers for freezing and then vacum sealed them, best part about the tupperware containers was that it made the food items easy to stack in the freezer. real time saver when all you have to do is basically reheat dinner up.

And miss camp cooking NOT A CHANCE.lol

Cheers Steve.

Apart from carrying cryovaced meats, we enjoy the fun of cooking meals on the open fire whenever possible.

Not sure what TIME one saves when you are on holiday as stated within this thread.... :-)

Personally, I don't. I guess if I had my own cryovac unit I probably might do some. Cryovac is indeed brilliant and I do purchase foods from supermarkets in towns that are pre-cryovaced (some fresh marinated meats and gourmet stuff is often packaged this way so that's handy). But no need to go overboard as food is rather fun to prepare when camping and can be quite a social activity. The trickest part would be reheating the pre-cooked food so that it doesn't dry out and that could take just as much effort and fuss as cooking it from scratch perhaps.

Geez,

Some people must carry BIG freezers.

Gday Andrea,
To each his own but...........your going for 3-4 months, do you expect to carry all the food ? Are you a new "Vanner" ?
Look, carry a couple of "quickie" meals if you have to but your gonna have to cook sooner or later, why not make it sooner.
You may learn to love camp cooking.

Have a great trip.............BIGDOG

G'day Andrea

We cook up some stew and freeze it in 2 lots. we put it in 2 decore containers of a size that fits nicely into our 40 litre Engel. Each one does us for 2 feeds. We find that they stay frozen for days and days. We love camp cooking when we are away but this is a nice easing into the trip.

Have a great time

Cheers

Peter

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and posts.

Andrea

Definitly dont do it unless frozen and kept frozen. Vacume packing cooked food is the same idea as canned food.
these cans are heated until the time/temperature of the coldest part of the can is sufficient to kill all botulism spores by a safe margin.
vaccume packing is fine for raw foods but there is bacteria that will thrive in the absence of oxygen in cooked food. botulism being the worst

when i said earlier we went for 5 weeks up the cape, we only really had enough frozen food for the first 3 weeks of our trip, hope you didn't think we had enough food for 5 weeks, sorry if this was the case. we have an 80ltr engel combi (half fridge / half freezer), we had enough room in the freezer for steak, bacon, hash browns, sausages, peas, beans and a heap of frozen stews and some stir fry meals, probably a few other things in the freezer that i don't remember aswell. it was especially good on days when we got into camp late and didn't feel like cooking, could just grab a precooked meal and reheat it.