I have looked everywhere i cannot find 4-cheese powder, or dehydrated cheese powder/mix. I have to buy mac and cheeses and store the noodles.

Cheese Sauce powder

This is even better :-)
http://www.frontiercoop.com/products.php?ct=dfmbc&cn=Cheese+Powder

All natural, I have gone to using it. Btw, you can buy direct from Frontier (they are often the brand sold at natural food store bulk bins) and their shipping is fast.

They also sell cheese powder that you can use in DIY sauce mixes:
http://www.frontiercoop.com/products.php?ct=dfmbc&cn=Cheese+Powder

Which can be used in this recipe:
http://www.trailcooking.com/recipes/parmesan-cheese-sauce-powder-mix

Isaac--If you aren't using cheese powder on the pasta, what do you use it on? Mind sharing if you have some good recipes using this stuff? I've had several packs of the kraft stuff in the pantry--the noodles got thrown out b/c they got wet but the cheese packs were sealed up and are fine. Need to use them somehow.

For a bit of extra taste with cheese sauce try adding a some dry mustard powder.
BTW, fresh garlic keeps. It is obviously bulkier and heavier but I think that the "medicinal" part (allicin, the sulphur smelling liquid) is mostly lost in the drying process.
(this is only my personal opinion....)
BTW, I would strongly suggest Sarah's recipe over the commercially available mac'n cheese .
Probably cheaper, most likely healthier.
Franco

I use it for Mac and cheese w/ beef
Cheesey beef w instant potatoes and spices
Cheesy chicken veggie rice (2tbsp dry milk, salt, 3tbsp cheese mix,1cup instant rice,1/2 cup your fav veggies)
I do dehydrated meatloaf with cheese mix and breadcrumbs and couscous, with ketchup packets added

Kinda made-up man meals but they work for me

"...dehydrated meatloaf with cheese mix and breadcrumbs and couscous"

That's really strangely excellent sounding. And I like Franco's thing with the mustard powder in the cheese sauce too--I'm going to try that.

Isaac, those sound pretty darn good!

oh and leave it to Cameron to find the cheese! Nice!

Packit Gourmet rocks BTW!

Brian...if you search here I can tell you I have posted a number of recipes that use cheese sauce powder over the years. My son loves the stuff (be it the good natural stuff or the orange dyed junk) so many recipes came out of that hungry boy.
You might also search my website as well - plenty more there that use csp.

Sarah, did you change your URL for your site. I tried to go there the other day (I have it saved) and it came up closed or not in service.....

Ken, both www.trailcooking.com and www.freezerbagcooking.com work :-) Try again and it should pop up :-)

Sarah, it's entirely possible it was due to operator error, but I searched your site yesterday or the day before and only found the cheese sauce recipe which I thought was strange. Just did it again, but this time I hit the jackpot--lots of recipes. Thank you!

Thanks Sarah, dunno what happened...but I will. I really enjoy your recipes!!!!

Brian,
Kirk has been tinkering on the site so that might have something to do with the search engine. Hopefully it continues to work right ;-)

Franco,

The company listed in Sarah's link, Frontier, has the most flavorful dried powder style garlic I've ever found, their "Garlic Granules".. We pretty much use fresh garlic exclusively, but this stuff is a close second as far as adding actual tangible garlic flavor.


Quite good, although from a medicinal standpoint, nada que ver.

Is dried cheese powder even any better than fresh cheese in terms of energy density? Here's a recent thread about fresh cheese, with discussion of the (lack of) need for refrigeration: http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/thread_display.html?forum_thread_id=12747 Fresh cheese is about 4 calories per gram. I did a little googling, and the results for powdered cheese are about the same. It may be a little hard to tell, because a lot of powdered cheese products are probably intentionally formulated to be low in fat, which is the opposite of what you want when you're backpacking. The calories in real cheese are basically fat, and fat is one of the densest forms of energy you can pack. And fresh cheese tastes a heck of a lot better than powdered.

It's always fresh cheese for me. I took a bag of grated parmesan out for 6 hot days and the left overs were still good for my next trip, the cheese didn't evn sweat at all.

I have a stupid question here. If I take ordinary grated parmesan cheese, open it to air, and put it in a ziplock bag... how long will it keep?

Assume temperature well below body temperature.

Does it get moldy, or what?

Maybe I need to test.

--B.G.--