Grocery-Store Backpacking Meals That Keep Costs Down

Beans and rice with Fritos and cheese

If DIY backpacking food has a single most famous dinner, this is it. It's Andrew Skurka's, it goes on essentially every trip he runs, and his clients rate it above everything else on the menu.

Pack instant rice and dehydrated refried bean flakes — roughly 40 g rice to 55 g beans — with a tablespoon of taco seasoning in one bag. Carry 40 g of Fritos and 40 g of hard cheese separately.

Boil about 1½ cups of water, stir in the rice and beans, cover, and leave it off the heat until it thickens. Then cube the cheese in, and crush the Fritos on top at the last second. The corn chips are not a garnish; they're a structural element, and they're where a third of the calories live.

Make sure the beans are dehydrated flakes, not dry beans. Dry beans will not become dinner on a canister stove, or on any schedule you'd recognize.

The ramen bomb

The other legend. Ramen plus instant mashed potato, in one pot, eaten at the end of a thirty-mile day by someone who has stopped caring what it looks like.

One ramen cake, half the seasoning packet, and a single-serve pouch of instant potatoes. Cook the noodles in about 1½ cups of water, don't drain, then stir the potato flakes in until the whole thing goes thick and slightly absurd. Add olive oil, a tuna or Spam packet if you want protein, and hot sauce.

It is a carbohydrate event rather than a meal, and that is precisely the point after a long day. Worth knowing: it cold-soaks perfectly well too, which is why stoveless hikers rely on it.

A Knorr Side, done properly

The workhorse. Around six hundred calories a pouch, a dollar or two, and stocked in essentially every grocery store in America — which is why one blogger memorably called it the go-to food of the Appalachian Trail.

Straight from the packet it's a side dish. To make it dinner: cook it in slightly less water than the box says, then stir in a tuna or chicken pouch, a tablespoon of olive oil, and something crunchy. Cheesy Broccoli with chicken and crispy onions is the reliable one. Mexican Rice with crushed tortilla chips and a lime wedge is the good one.

The oil matters more than it sounds. These packets are engineered for a home kitchen where you'd add butter and milk; without added fat they taste thin and you'll be hungry again by nine.

Trail pizza

Consistently the meal people report as the surprise favorite of a trip, and it needs no stove at all.

One flour tortilla, a squeeze of pizza sauce, shelf-stable pepperoni, and shredded mozzarella or a couple of Babybels. Assemble, fold, eat. Two of them is a proper lunch for around 650 calories.

If you have a pan and a few spare minutes, warming it changes the whole thing — the cheese goes molten and it stops being a wrap and starts being pizza. But cold in a windy col at noon it still works, which is more than most meals can claim.

Yes, cheese is fine unrefrigerated. Hard and semi-hard cheeses keep several days without cold; they may sweat a little oil, which is cosmetic.

Peanut noodles

Skurka's second most requested dinner, and the one I'd point a skeptic toward, because it tastes like something rather than like fuel.

Per person: 85 g of thin quick-cooking noodles (ramen without seasoning, or rice vermicelli), 2 tablespoons peanut butter, 1 teaspoon soy sauce powder or a sachet, ½ teaspoon each of ground ginger and garlic powder, a pinch of sugar, chili flakes, and 15 g of chopped peanuts.

Cook the noodles in just enough water to cover. Before you drain anything, spoon a little of the hot noodle water into a mug and loosen the peanut butter and seasonings into a sauce there — this is the step that prevents a peanut lake at the bottom of the pot. Stir it through, peanuts on top.

Loaded instant mashed potatoes

Instant potato is unfairly maligned. It is exceptionally good at holding fat and salt, which is what your body is asking for at eight o'clock on a cold night.

50 g potato flakes, 2 tablespoons bacon bits or soy crumbles, 30 g grated hard cheese, a tablespoon of dried chives, plenty of black pepper. Crispy fried onions in a separate packet.

Water first, then flakes, stirring — not the other way round, unless you enjoy lumps. Hold back a few tablespoons of the water so you can stop at soft rather than sliding into soup. Onions on top at the end.

There's a well-known thru-hiker variant that swaps the bacon for diced pepperoni and crumbles blue corn chips over the top, which is better than it sounds.

Tuna mac

A boxed macaroni cheese whose instructions work without milk, or 85 g of quick pasta repackaged with 2 tablespoons powdered cheese. Add a tuna pouch, 2 tablespoons freeze-dried peas, black pepper, and — this is the important part — a mustard sachet.

Cook the pasta and peas together. Leave a spoonful of starchy water in the pot to build the sauce. Cheese, tuna, and mustard in off the heat.

Without the mustard it's a uniformly soft, uniformly rich bowl and you'll get bored halfway through. With it, there's something to push against. Any acid does this job — a vinegar packet, a lemon sachet, hot sauce.

Couscous with tuna, lemon, and capers

The most forgiving starch in the store. Couscous doesn't cook, it just rehydrates: boiling water, cover, five minutes, done. No simmering means no scorched pot and almost no fuel.

80 g instant couscous, a tablespoon of dried vegetables, ½ teaspoon garlic powder, and salt in one bag. Separately: a tuna pouch, a tablespoon of olive oil, and a lemon sachet or a few lemon crystals. Capers if you're the sort of person who will carry a tiny leakproof pot for capers. Capers are worth the tiny leakproof container.

160 ml boiling water to that much couscous. The oil is what carries the lemon through the grain — without fat, couscous tastes faintly of warm packing material.

Trail Thanksgiving

A box of stuffing mix, a chicken pouch, and a gravy sachet. That's the whole thing.

Cook the stuffing per the packet with a tablespoon of oil added, stir in the chicken, and pour the gravy over. Dried cranberries if you're committed to the concept.

It is comfort food of the most direct kind, it costs about three dollars, and it is startlingly good on a cold night in October. Nobody has ever been disappointed by it, which is not something you can say about most trail dinners.

Hiker-trash pad Thai

Rice vermicelli, a peanut butter packet, a lime sachet, sriracha, crushed peanuts, and a handful of dried vegetables.

Rice noodles are the useful part: they rehydrate in very hot water in about three minutes without any real cooking, so this is nearly fuel-free. Soften the noodles, drain most of the water, then stir in peanut butter, lime, and sriracha with a splash of the hot water to make it saucy. Peanuts and, if you have them, dried scallions on top.

It's the one on this list that tastes least like backpacking food, which after four days is worth something.

Shopping without ending up with five half-used bags

Ranges were checked as planning estimates in September 2026 and vary by store, brand, and package size. Three dinners usually land around $8–$18 before shared oil, spices, or toppings. Calculate your actual portions from the nutrition labels; many instant foods are high in sodium, so compare labels rather than assuming the saltiest meal automatically solves hydration.

Write four blanks for each dinner — base, substantial, flavor, texture — and fill them in before you go. Couscous plus tuna plus lemon plus capers is a meal. Couscous plus a seasoning packet is a thing that has finished cooking.

Check every package for the water volume and the real cook time, not the optimistic one on the front. A pasta that needs twelve minutes of simmering is a different fuel proposition from one that needs four, and pretending otherwise is how people run out of gas on night three.

Repackage meal by meal and write the water amount on each bag in marker. Keep wet pouches whole. And buy the oil, spices, and crunchy toppings with a friend, then split them — the savings from grocery-store cooking come from using the whole bottle, not from five partial bags quietly going stale in a cupboard until next spring.

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Fuel is part of cost and weight. A meal that needs a 12-minute simmer can use several times the fuel of one that only returns to a boil and rests; test one serving with the exact pot, stove, and windscreen setup. Repackage only when the cooking directions and allergen label travel with the food, and store every opened pouch and repackaged ingredient as a scented item overnight.