NOLS Cookery (National Outdoor
Leadership School) by Claudia
Pearson
A Unique Perspective On Cookery Techniques
Wilderness chefs looking to make their meals more nutritious and
appealing need look no further than this newest edition of NOLS Cookery,
the National Outdoor Leadership Schools classic guide to backcountry
cooking. From Cowboy Coffee to Darn Tootin Black Beans to Scrambled
Brownies, the books recipes and culinary advice are guaranteed to please
the palate and provide the energy needed for strenuous outdoor activity.
Extensive revisions based on up-to-date research have been made to the
nutrition section, and nutrient analyses are provided for all recipes.
Additional sections cover fire preparation, cooking technique, and ration
planning.
Personal Review: NOLS Cookery (National Outdoor Leadership
School) by Claudia Pearson

I'm a window shopper at outdoors stores. I like the stuff they sell, but I'm a
basement rat, the sort of person who might go into convulsions without a
nearby internet connection or even a cellular signal. I am most assuredly
not NOLS material. But I love this book.
From the perspective of a kitchen geek, this is a pretty cool book because
it explains the challenges of cooking in the outdoors, especially without a
premade meal plan. The gear is very different from what might exist in a
typical kitchen -- campstoves little bigger than bunsen burners, cooking
pans of appalling thinness and lightness, interesting uses for gear that no
one would even consider in a normal kitchen, ingredients that a "serious"
cook would never touch. But it all works, and this is a no-panic guide to
getting it to work. This edition adds extensive nutritional information about
the recipes, essential to backpackers who need to keep their calorie intake
up or limit some aspect of their meal ingredients such as salt or fat.
An interesting point about the recipes is that a great many of them are
vegetarian. It seems meat does not travel well in the backcountry, so with
a very few exceptions (stock bases, beef jerky, bacon bits, etc) a large
amount of the recipes use more backpack-stable meat substitutes such as
TVP or beans to bulk out the finished dish. The recipes go from the simple
(polenta and other boiled grains, soups) to the ambitious (yeasted breads)
to the highly unusual (NOLS specialties such as Phil's Power Dinner,
apparently a distant, meatless relative of oyako donburi made with
couscous or bulgur wheat). Extensive information is provided on ration
planning, and virtually nothing requires at-home preparation (a departure
from most backpacking cookbooks).
The one gotcha of this book: know your sources. Some of the ingredients
this book uses are NOLS-issued, and you will need to find substitutions for
some of them, so familiarize yourself with companies that specialize in
camping food so you know where to order your ingredients. Also, their
process of packing bulk rations in unmarked bags and distinguishing them
by taste when necessary strikes me as being a little brute-force -- while it's
always useful to be able to do, is it really that hard to slip a sharpie in your
backpack so you can label the flour and potato flakes out on the trail?
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