Skurka’s Beans for Non-Americans

Andrew Skurka’s Beans with Fritos and Cheese is ubiquitous in the Ultralight backpacking world, turning into something of a cult legend. It’s consistently rated as thru-hikers favourite meal and even many years later, with freeze dried meals being more affordable than ever, it remains a hyper budget conscious option.

There is one huge, glaring flaw though - you absolutely cannot buy dehydrated refried beans in Australia. This is something that has popped up on the internet from hikers all over the world - I want to make rice and beans but I can’t get the beans! In my case, I also could not get the rice Skurka recommended, so what is a boy to do?

The Plan

So I can’t get the rice, or the beans, for my rice and beans meal. Now what.

I fairly recently purchased an inexpensive food dehydrator from Big W and figured if it’s good enough for fruit and veg, it’s probably good enough for a tin of refried beans, so this is the plan.

Rice is a little bit harder but I did find that some Australian supplier sell big bags of freeze dried rice and the per meal cost is very efficient. I bought my rice from Camper’s Pantry. Camper’s Pantry, and other suppliers like Eumarrah also supply a variety of other freeze dried and dehydrated goods that could easily be added to this meal, from chicken to green beans to carrots to capsicum.

Dehydrating Beans

I don’t know a lot about tinned refried beans, so I just bought some from the supermarket. I have no doubts that making your own would taste significantly better, but I haven’t committed to the beans that much yet.

The victim.

This is not going to be all that interesting, in fact it’s about as interesting as watching beans dry. Keeping it simple, I cut some baking paper to the size of my dehydrator and spread the beans fairly thin on the paper. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that thinner was much better. If you have a nicer dehydrator, you might have some silicon sheet you can use instead of baking paper.

Spread it more evenly than I did, you will be grateful.

Dehydrator on a medium heat for a few hours - this ended up taking significantly longer than anticipated. You can see in the image below that the drying process is not uniform and when some beans were dried, a lot of the thicker sections had a slighly gummy texture. I wasn’t sure if this was just how the dried beans would be, but after a few more hours they were truly dry, almost flaky - do not stop when it is maybe dry, it will spoil!

Some parts are dry and some aren't, can you see where it changes?

When it was finished, the beans looked as so:

It's not bran flakes, it's bean flakes.

Trying The Meal

Seriously, this blog post does not get more interesting.

I weighed out the meal per Skurka’s recommendation in my toaks inside my kitchen. I did consider sitting on a sit pad on the floor for a pseudo-authentic camping experience but went with the kitchen bench instead.

It'll look better when you've been walking all day...

Add water, cook. The beans rehydrated very well, but it does turn into a bit of a homogenous mix.

Moist.

Add cheese and corn chips and you’re done!

Bone Apple Teeth.

Outcome

When eating this at home, with access to real food, this meal was… fine. I think on the trail it would be very satisfying and I do plan to use this. I like to add some secret spice mix, which I bring with me in a small bottle, to the meal for a bit of extra pep. This meal ends up costing a fraction of what a pre-packed dehydrated meal would and is very caloricly efficient, so overall I think it’s a winner.

For those without access to dried refried beans in a packet, this is a great alternative!