Australian Food, Part 2: Backpacking Food

For study abroad, I went backpacking in the Australian Outback in an area called the Kimberley. Food is a big part of backpacking trips and requires meticulous planning. For my trip, we carried 2 weeks of food and were given another ration at the end of each 2 weeks. While backpacking, you can burn over 4,000 calories a day so you have to adjust what you’re eating so you aren’t calorie deficient. Lightness is also a significant factor because you carry everything on your back. Lastly, foods can’t be refrigerated in the wilderness so longer trips require nonperishable foods. Even though this sounds limiting, you can actually make a lot of good food while backpacking. During my backpacking trip in Australia, the most surprising foods I made on my trip were pizza and fish tacos. 

To make pizza, we packed flour, yeast, sugar, and salt for the dough and cheese, pepperoni, and tomato paste for toppings. We made the dough, put it in a plastic bag, and put that inside a sleeping bag in order to let it rise. About an hour later, we put it in the pan with oil and added the toppings. To cook, we used a backpacking stove. These stoves are light and collapsable and come in two parts: a small metal stove connected to a fuel bottle. We placed the covered pan on the lit stove and about five minutes later we had pizza.

We also made fish tacos using tortillas we packed with us and fish we caught fresh from the ocean. We were able to catch a Spangled emperor and Common Dart after we spent most of the day fishing.  This way of eating is so different from how most people get their meat because we caught and prepared the meat ourselves. After we cleaned the fish, we fried it in the pan and wrapped it in tortillas. One of my instructors also caught an octopus, so we were able to make calamari as well.