issues with dehydrating spaghetti sauce

[njdoxie]

Last year I decided to dehydrate my own meals as I like them much better than Mountain House. So I made spaghetti sauce with meat and added in the pasta and dehydrated it and it dried out perfectly, but never rehydrated that well, the sauce and meat never rehydrated to well, although I still liked it. To improve on last year, some folks suggested drying out the sauce separately and running it through a spice grinder. To test this out, I dried out some sauce.....all the water is gone, but it's still mushy because of the olive oil used in the sauce....I've tried to remove the oil with paper towels to no avail......and I don't know how well this will keep on a 9 day backback elk hunt....I would have no worries if it was dry and I could powder it. Apparently, when I dehydrated the sauce with the pasta the previous year, the pasta soaked up the oil and it appeared perfectly dry.

How do I remedy this situation? Not use olive oil in the recipe?

I was thinking of letting it sit out on the countertop for 10 days and see if it went bad. It's in my freezer now while I try to figure this out.

Certainly someone has encountered this situation and can enlighten me.

EDIT: I resolved this issue, not by going fat free or adding bread crumbs, I just put the dehydrated mix in a blender and chopped it up smaller, then when I add water, I put the bag in a coozie for insulation, let it sit 20 -30 minutes longer and it was totally rehydrated.

 

[Ray]

I go as fat free in the food as possible to prevent this. Then I add in fat in the field using little packs of olive oil or coconut oil.

I use seasoned ground chicken or turkey rather than beef or pork.

I grind all my sauces and meat up to make them as much of a powder as possible.

I switched to Thai Kitchen brand thin rice noodles that just need to soak in hot water for a few minutes.

 

[blackpowderhunter]

just like ray said, you need to go as fat free as possible.
I would recommend not using any olive oil or as little as possible in the recipe.
with regards to meat. I lean towards using the LEANEST meats possible...venison/elk/ground turkey.
the other trick when it comes to cooking ground meat is to break the meat into the smallest possible pieces while cooking, and after fully cooked, put into a colander and run HOT water over it. This will rinse much of the residual fat off of the meat. After doing this return it to the dish and cook as normal. Doing this, I have had no issues re-hydrating ground turkey in my chili mac recipes.

 

[njdoxie]

Thanks for ideas