Experimenting With a New Recipe for the Valtcan 1.8 Liter

Today’s cooking is an experiment to find a new recipe for the Valtcan 1.8 liter pressure cooker. This experiment has only one stipulation…. Everything has to come from freeze dried ingredients. So I opened up my pantry tins and started mixing the chow.

This is the large pantry kit with five different 8 ounce containers, and six different 16 ounce containers.

The waxed cotton canvas sleeve holds a smaller cookpot with lid and the stack of 8 ounce containers.

This represents about a week’s worth of food because it’s freeze dried or dehydrated.

I start off by using 1/3 of the container marked chicken chili. This is the Auguson Farms Southwest Chili mix, and added Auguson Farms freeze dried chicken chunks. The spices are turmeric, black pepper, minced garlic, smoked paprika, crushed red pepper flakes, and cilantro.

Next I added about 3 ounces of whole wheat pasta penne.

One small packet of organic chicken broth powder goes in next, along with a handful of diced red and green bell peppers and chopped onions. Each packet of broth mix makes 8 ounces of broth.

One regular hardtack biscuit is added into the mix. The great thing about hardtack is that they start off tough as a brick, but they turn into a huge dumpling when fully cooked.

Each hardtack adds 100 - 125 calories per cracker serving, and it’s the last ingredient added. The Valtcan is sealed and placed on the gas stove for 45 minutes. Monitor the pot to make sure it’s still blowing steam and cooking. The meat gets rehydrated completely and the hardtack becomes completely soft.

The pasta and hardtack adds needed calories, the freeze dried meat and beans and protein, the bell peppers and onions add bulk.

The stew is spooned out and grated Parmesan cheese is sprinkled on top and stirred in. This has really turned out great.