Farm to Summit makes dehydrated meals using ‘cosmetically challenged’ veggies

Farm to Summit makes dehydrated meals using ‘cosmetically challenged’ veggies

Farm to Summit

Farm to Summit, a woman-owned, Colorado-based company, uses farm “seconds” to make dehydrated meals for backpackers. Pam LeBlanc photo

I’m always on the prowl for good dehydrated meals to take on camping and backpacking trips.

I’ve long been a fan of Austin-based Packit Gourmet, which makes my hands-down favorite just-add-water dish – Dottie’s Chicken and Dumplings. But during a trip to Telluride for the annual Bluegrass Festival this summer, I met two women who’d recently started their own dehydrated meal company.

Related: Taste Testing Packit Gourmet 

I had to give it a try.

Farm to Summit’s tagline is “dehydrated meals that give a damn.” I might add “dehydrated meals that taste like real food instead of salt and cardboard.”

Farm to Summit

Jane Barden and Louise Barton teamed up to create Farm to Summit, which makes sustainably farmed dehydrated meals for backpacking. Pam LeBlanc photo

Company co-founders Louise Barton and Jane Barden, a Durango-based couple, teamed up in 2020 to start the business. Combining their backgrounds in farming, fine dining and ecology, their meals are made with what they call “cosmetically challenged vegetables” from local farmers, the oft-discarded seconds that might not look as pretty as what you see on the Whole Foods Market shelf. You know the type – lumpy, oddball looking veggies that taste just as good as the perfectly shaped ones.

Barden grew up on her family’s farm in Michigan. She hates waste – especially unharvested veggies or “flawed produce.” She also worked in the restaurant. Industry. Barton, a botanist and research ecologist who loves to backpack, couldn’t find a backpacking meal she liked. The two teamed up to make their own.

When I met them at the Telluride street market, they sent me home with a packet of green chile mac & cheese ($13.50) to test. The packet sat in my pantry until last week, when I kayaked out to a floating campsite at Sea Rim State Park near Port Arthur, in southeast Texas.

camping

Callie Summerlin of Port Arthur heats water for a dehydrated meal while camping at Sea Rim State Park. Pam LeBlanc photo

It’s easy to make – boil 2 cups water, pour it into the packet of dried noodles, let it sit 20 minutes, add cheese packet, stir, and enjoy. It’s way better than that neon-orange stuff that Kraft makes and you ate as a kid. The green chile adds a zing, but it’s not overpowering. And if you’re looking for a wallop of calories, look no farther. It packs 890 calories and 32 grams of protein.

For me, it ranks up there with Packit Gourmet’s line of foods

Farm to Summit is not sold in Texas stores, but you can order it online at https://farmtosummit.com. Shipping is free when you spend $50 or more.

 

 

 

 

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What’s biltong? A less sweet, higher protein type of beef jerky

What’s biltong? A less sweet, higher protein type of beef jerky

biltong

Apex Protein Snacks makes biltong and meat sticks. Pam LeBlanc photo

Sunday’s trip to Inks Lake State Park provided the perfect opportunity to test out an array of meat snacks made by Apex Protein Snacks.

The company makes meat sticks and “biltong,” a drier, more shredded and less sweet version of beef jerky.

My initial reaction to the biltong, a type of dried, cured meat that originated in South Africa? Not enough flavor. Too cardboardy. But the snacks might make good fuel on a long-distance backpacking trip, when you need protein, but sweet stuff might sour your stomach.

Looking for craft-style non-alcoholic beer? Try Athletic Brewing Company’s lineup

Apex bills its products as “Food Fit for Adventure.” I tried two flavors of biltong – spicy peri peri and mesquite BBQ. Per 1 ounce serving, the biltong had 90 calories, 2 grams of fat and 16 grams of protein.

By comparison, Jack Link’s beef jerky has 80 calories, 1 gram of fat and 11 grams of protein. But the ingredient panel for Jack Link’s jerky included sugar and brown sugar – two ingredients that don’t make an appearance on the Apex product.

In a nutshell, the Apex biltong had more protein and less sugar.

I also sampled a few meat sticks, which I liked better, although they still didn’t have enough punch for my taste buds. The original flavor had 90 calories, 11 grams of protein and 0 grams of sugar. The 1.5-ounce stick felt less greasy than some of the other brands I’ve tried, too.

The meat sticks sell online for $29.99 for a box of 12, although they’re running a $24.99 special right now. A 2.25-ounce bag of biltong costs $7.99.

A portion of proceeds goes to the company’s non-profit Kids in the Outdoors organization, which helps bring outdoor experiences to underprivileged youth.

 

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Wonder what Pam packs in her backpack for a night on the trail?

Wonder what Pam packs in her backpack for a night on the trail?

Pam LeBlanc’s backpack and contents for an overnight trip at Lake Somerville this week. Pam LeBlanc photo

Wonder what I stuff in my backpack before hitting the trail?

I unpacked my gear after a short overnight stay at a primitive site in the Nails Creek Unit at Lake Somerville State Park.

Here’s what I carried, starting at the top left and going by rows:

  1. Baseball cap
  2. Buff (borrowed from Joe)
  3. Sandals to wear in camp
  4. PJ pants and long-sleeved shirt
  5. Tent in orange bag (Big Agnes Copper Spur II)
  6. Gas, tiny campstove and pot for boiling water
  7. Osprey backpack
  8. Sleeping bag in black stuff sack
  9. Foam cushion for sitting
  10. Inflatable sleeping pad (Sea to Summit Etherlight XT)
  11. First aid kit
  12. Water bottle
  13. Platypus bag with water (on longer trips I bring a water filter system)
  14. Cosmetics bag with glasses, sunscreen, toothpaste and toothbrush
  15. Headlamp
  16. Sunglasses
  17. Ditty bag filled with snacks to clip around waist
  18. Freeze-dried meals (Austin-based PackIt Gourmet are my favorite)
  19. Titanium spoon

 

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My Packit Gourmet has arrived and I’m ready for adventure!

My Packit Gourmet has arrived and I’m ready for adventure!

My shipment of dehydrated meals just arrived from Packit Gourmet. Pam LeBlanc photo


I just got a shipment of dehydrated meals, the first sign of my upcoming trip to the Texas Coast to follow the Arctic Cowboys (plus one) as they paddle from Boca Chica Beach to Sabine Pass.
I’m pretty psyched, since I’ve been at home since flying in from Canada on March 5. To celebrate, I got a brain-tickling nasal swab COVID-19 test at a drive-through station today, something all four members of the expedition – trip leader West Hansen, Jeff Wueste, Branndon Bargo and Jimmy Harvey – are also doing to make sure we don’t cross contaminate one another.
The food came from Packit Gourmet, an Austin-based company I discovered in 2016, when I wrote about them for the Austin American-Statesman. (Read the article at https://www.statesman.com/NEWS/20161208/Austin-based-Packit-Gourmet-makes-meals-fit-for-the-back-country?_ga=2.143733554.663474386.1589468570-1283764380.1333191630.)
Sarah Welton hatched the idea for the company, which makes lightweight camping meals that taste like real food, instead of heavily-salted cardboard, while she was earning a graduate business degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. She’d grown up paddle camping with her parents, self-described hippies who dehydrated their own ingredients to cook along the way.

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Welton’s mom, Debbie Mullins, developed some of the recipes, which Welton tried on her classmates. The company officially launched in 2008 with a few items including Austintacious tortilla soup. A popular backpacking blogger bought mentioned the meals on her blog and recommended them to Backpacker Magazine, which awarded Packit Gourmet an editor’s choice award.
I took an array of meals along when I backpacked the John Muir Trail four years ago, and loved the stuff. I poured boiling water into what looked like a bowl of confetti but bloomed into a piping hot bowl of chicken and dumplings. The Texas State Fair Chili got the highest marks from me. (I wasn’t so thrilled about the “hamburger,” which requires a tortilla for wrapping.) The breakfasts are the best – particularly the West Memphis Grits Souffle. And who doesn’t like banana pudding, especially while backpacking?
Today’s shipment includes a few I haven’t tried yet: Polenta with Pork Sausage and Pasta Beef Bolognese. Stay tuned for a full report on those.
In all, the company offers about 50 different meals, including vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free options, all easily prepared with hot or cold water. Top sellers include Big Easy gumbo, high-protein smoothies and something called Ramen Rescue, a pack of dried veggies designed to spice up your own noodles.

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She drove us to a trailhead 9 years ago, last week we met for tea in Bozeman

She drove us to a trailhead 9 years ago, last week we met for tea in Bozeman

Pam LeBlanc and Jenny Dalimata pose outside a coffee shop in Bozeman. Dalimata shuttled Pam and five other hikers to a remote area of the park in 2010. Chris LeBlanc photo

In 2010, I backpacked the Northern Traverse at Glacier National Park with my husband and four other friends.

When we got to the park, we needed a way to get to the trailhead, located in the remote northwest corner of Glacier not served by shuttles.

That’s how we found Jenny Dalimata. We found her at a restaurant where she was waiting tables in West Glacier. She seemed nice, so we gave her $100 bucks to drive us in our rental car to the trailhead and return it to a more centrally located parking lot. We crossed our fingers that she wouldn’t disappear, but we were pretty sure it would work out fine.

It did, of course. We got a friendly ride to the trailhead and we got the car back in the end.

Jenny and I have stayed in touch via social media since then. She’s an amazing athlete, who spends lots of time skiing, hiking and trail running in and around Glacier. She and her seven brothers grew up just outside of the park, and she “ran wild” as a kid.

When I headed back to Glacier this year, I tracked her down, and we met at a coffee shop in Bozeman before I caught my flight back to Austin. She still remembers that my backpacking buddies and I all ordered grilled salmon and huckleberry pie the night we met – and did it again after we finished our 65-mile trek.

“When you came out (of the back country) you were like ‘I’ll have another,’” she says.

Pam stands at the entrance of Glacier National Park in July 2019.

These days, Jenny routinely makes a 30- to 50-mile runs through the park and other wilderness areas around Montana for fun and stress relief.

Since it’s grizzly country, she carries bear spray – and three times she’s had to deploy it, once when a grizzly bear charged her. (No worries, the griz spun and fled when she deployed.) Another time, while snow camping in the winter, she saw a wolverine near Lake Josephine.

That never happens on Austin trails, although I did meet a tiny black bear while trail running at Big Bend National Park one morning a few years ago.

The trails at Glacier, Jenny says, are pristine, nicely graded and well maintained, perfect for trail running.

“My heart lives there,” she says. “It’s powerful for me to be there.”

We shared tea and chatted about where our lives have taken us.

The thing about travel that makes it so special is the people you meet along the way. The randomness of who you cross paths with always amazes me. We met Jenny over salmon and pie, and 10 years later we saw each other again.

And I know I’ll see her the next time I get back to Montana.

 

About Pam

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