by Today, we are making a variation on our recipe, Better Instant Ramen. Take those boring instant noodles and make them into a camping delight.
Given the opportunity, I like to try a camping meal at home first. It gives me the chance to try things out and find mistakes or things I could do better next time. Also, it gives me a chance to try the meal out on my kids to see if they will like it, and get their input for any changes. I go through the complete process, drying out any ingredients I plan to dehydrate, and using them in the meal.
For this meal, I dehydrated ground beef, corn, green onions, wood ear mushrooms, and eggs. I combined all the ingredients into a sandwich bag, keeping the eggs separate in a little snack bag tucked inside (I added these as a topping once the bowls were served).
I dried all the ingredients in my home food dehydrator on different trays for about 8 hours at a temperature of 135ºF. Once everything was dry and packed, I placed the bag in my refrigerator to store in order to avoid any potential spoilage. I made this meal a week after the drying process.
Once I assembled all of my ingredients, I started with boiling the noodles in salted water. In this recipe, I suggest making your own broth using miso and stock cubes with a little soy sauce. A lot of chefs will suggest throwing away the salt packets, but I think they flavor the water well for cooking the noodles. Sure, you could cook your noodles in the broth, but I like the result of taking the extra step to cook the noodles separately.
Step 1: Boil your noodles in water salted with the seasoning packets
So first, place your noodles in the pot with the contents of the salt packets, and cover with as much water as you need. As the noodles cook, they will soften and relax into the water, so you don’t have to submerge them. Once they have boiled for 3-4 minutes and look relaxed, give them a little taste to see if they are done. Once they finish cooking, drain off the salted water and divide the noodles into serving bowls.
These noodles also came with packets of black garlic oil, so I added those to the noodles at this stage and gave them a quick mix.
Step 2: Create your broth for the noodles
Now your cooking pot is empty, it’s time to make your broth. For each serving of broth, I usually add one teaspoon of miso and one stock cube, then season it with a little soy sauce if needed. For this preparation, I made three servings, and only used two stock cubes (or one big Knorr cube). You should experiment with this a bit and see what you like.
A note about Miso. They often suggest that you keep Miso paste refrigerated. Most stores will sell it in the refrigerated section. If I can keep it cool or refrigerated, I will. But if it stays out for a day or two, I won’t worry too much about it. Miso paste with dashi added to it would be better refrigerated. But they did not traditionally do the process to ferment Miso with refrigeration. You want to keep it in an air-tight container, and maybe wrapped in plastic. Also, don’t keep it out of a refrigerated environment longer than you have to.
All this being said, use your best judgement with fresh miso, or see if you can find a powdered version.
Once you have your miso broth ready, you can add your dehydrated ingredients. I added the egg to the noodles in the bowls as my kids like the crunchiness of them. Into the broth I added the ground beef, dried corn, green onions, and wood ear mushrooms and let them simmer for a few minutes. After four or five minutes, I tasted the ingredients simmering to see if they were done. The corn took the longest to soften up.
Once the soup was ready, I poured some over each of the noodle servings and scooped out bits of the food simmering in the pot into the bowls.
Step 3: Add your garnishes
From there, I let each of my kids add in their own selection of garnish. I chose the fried garlic and spicy sesame oil.
The Results
Overall, the dish turned out well. Both of my kids asked to eat this on our next camping trip. With their feedback, I can tune this dish a little so they will look forward to it on our next adventure.
Next time, I think I’ll rehydrate the eggs with the broth instead of using them as a crunch topping. The corn turned out ok, but I think I’d rather use canned corn if weight and space were not an issue (car camping vs. backpacking). We all enjoyed the wood ear mushrooms, and they dried/rehydrated really well. The green onions seasoned the dish well.
The noodles came out fairly flavorful, simmering in the water flavored by the seasoning packet. Making miso broth tasted much better and cut down on the sodium. The rehydrated ground beef was fine and gave some much needed protein to the dish.
