Trail Meal | Brotsuppe | Hike for Purpose

A good way to use up old stale bread in Germany is to throw it in a soup, since seeing that around here I thought that was also a good one to turn into a Trail Meal recipe for hiking and camping. Read on for the recipe!

Brotsuppe or Bread soup is one of those dishes that takes care to use up every leftover and scrap, since I’m Dutch I did not grow up on German Brotsuppe, so I don’t have a long history with it. It does however appeal to my Dutch cheapness. You can find it with a lot of ingredients or the most basic, and the core components are a flavorful broth, and some proper German bread. I used some bauernbrot for this, or farmers’ bread. Take your favorite bread, or use some nice sourdough. For added calories and oomph, combine in some dried sausage or jerky. For added calories and protein.

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Ingredients

The bread is key in this recipe, if you use some toast or basic wonderbread here, it will turn a lot mushier than with some sourdough bread. Take a look around your local bakery and grocery stores.

50 grams of dried cubed bread
2 tablespoons dried vegetables (Leek, carrot, celery, celery root, onions, parsley, lovage)
1 beef bouillon cube
half a teaspoon of white pepper
Tiny pinch caraway seeds
Optional – dried meat or sausage

Drying the bread and veggies

The bread has to be completely dried for this to be a trail meal, that way you can store the ready-made trail meal for a few months and it can sit around without a fridge. And of course, it is way lighter. In a pinch on trail, you can also find some croutons in the grocery store.

Drying the bread can be as simple as setting it out on the counter and protecting it from flies, depending on your climate. A safer way is to use a dehydrator or oven on a low setting for an hour or two. Cut up the bread first into centimeter cubes or smaller. Then dry.

Vegetables are best dried in a dehydrator, and you can use what you’re in the mood for or is available to you. I cheated here a bit and picked up a dried mix meant for soups in the supermarket. When drying your vegetables cut them up as fine as you can and throw in the dehydrator for ~6 hours or until completely dried. Best done in a large batch and stored separately, or divided into multiple trail meals.

Trail ready

Getting it trail-ready boils down to throwing all the ingredients in a ziploc baggie, don’t forget to date and name it for easy identification.

Total Trail weight: ~ 80 grams a portion. Depending on meat component. Plus 150 grams for my example of the sausages.

Cooking on Trail

Like pretty much all Trail Meals, there isn’t much cooking involved, simply throw all the ingredients into some water, bring to a boil, let stand for a few minutes before digging in. The longer you let it stand the mushier it will become. For the 50 grams of bread, I added 300 grams of water.

Try it out and let me know what you think!