One Pan Wonders

Drying Canned Cream of Mushroom Soup

You can make a backpacker friendly version of mushroom soup, so why take the time and energy to dry the canned stuff? A few reasons. One, I usually have several cans of the “cheap stuff” in my pantry. Two, it’s easy. Just dump and dry. Three, some ingredients can be hard to find for some people (powdered milk, dried mushrooms, etc). Frontier food carries a good dried mix if you care to bother with mail order ingredients.

It doesn’t get much easier than drying canned items. Just spread, as thinly as possible, one can per lined dehydrator tray. Set the temperature at 135 and let it run. My machine took about 5-6 hours to dry 2 trays (I had other things on more trays) of soup.

The final product was much oilier than I had expected, but I am pretty convinced that this is largely because I was drying a really cheap product. Higher quality soup will most likely result in a much better final product. Like most everything, the better ingredients you start with, the better the end outcome will be. This theme is true for all cooking.

Dry until leathery enough to flip over, then dry until the soup can be broken up into small pieces.

Two cans of concentrated cream of mushroom soup dried yields about 1 ½ cups of soup crumbles.