As I can't go camping or bike touring at the moment, I'm taking the chance to experiment with some home-made dehydrated meals – doing everything at home but as if I was on the road. One idea is based on red lentils, with a separate sachet of dehydrated vegetables/vegetable powders/herbs/spices to rehydrate into a sauce, the whole thing served with couscous or pasta.
Stated cooking times for split red lentils range from 10 to 30 minutes; my DIY lightweight alcohol stove runs for about 10-20 minutes on a fill and I'd ideally like to boil water for the accompaniment as well on a single fill (both to minimise the amount of fuel I have to carry and to avoid the risks associated with refilling a hot stove or delay waiting for it to cool).
So how quick-cooking can I make my red lentils? My first thought is to soak them for a few hours, which I tried today (4 hours soaking) with reasonable success. This simulates knowing by mid-afternoon that I need to cook a dinner. I may experiment with a shorter soak, as it would be good to be able to cook at shorter notice. But is it possible/worthwhile to cook them and then dry them again (properly dehydrated so they'd keep)? Is there some other idea I'm missing?
Best Answer
I can’t give you numbers as I haven’t experimented with it yet (but am very inspired to do so by your post), but assuming that you will be heating water for a morning coffee or so, have you considered putting the lentils into a smallish thermos container, topping them up with boiling water and letting them soak / slow cook during the day? Adding your dehydrated veggies and spices wouldn’t require any serious cooking at all, just a quick reheating or bringing it back to a boil.
The idea is roughly based on the principle of a haybox, where food is cooked by placing the hot out into an insulating environment. And combined with the “quick soak” method for beans, where the beans are not soaked in cold, but boiling water, but for just thirty minutes instead of overnight.
Admittedly, this would probably get the lentils in the danger zone for longer than the canonical two hours, but on the other hand, we are not dealing with proteins like meat, raw eggs or dairy. But you could always adjust the time when you start the lentils to fit stricter food safety guidelines or your personal risk tolerance, e.g. boiling the water at your lunch break.