Backpacking legend Andrew Skurka — the first person to complete the Sea-to-Sea Route, the Great Western Loop and the Alaska-Yukon Expedition — has shared his go-to backcountry dinner in a new cooking video series with The Trek: peanut noodles. It looks like brown sludge in a Nalgene bottle, he admits, but it's his most-requested group meal after cheesy potatoes, and for good reason.
The numbers explain the appeal. A single serving weighs just 5.7 ounces yet packs 809 calories — about 141 calories per ounce, an unusually high energy-to-weight ratio when every gram in your pack counts. It's built around a three-ounce bag of ramen noodles per person, plus a sauce made from peanut butter (1.3 oz per person), toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, coconut milk powder, garlic and ginger powder, and sriracha, finished with fresh or powdered lime. Roasted peanuts (0.8 oz) go in each bowl, or you can halve them and add dehydrated peas for some green. Gluten-free ramen works too.
The key insight: this is a group meal, not a solo one. Skurka runs guided trips with eight to ten people and serves it on every single outing, but a solo thru-hiker would struggle to source all the ingredients in trail towns and would carry the overhead of a leakproof bottle. His system is efficient — one person carries the shared sauce, mixed at home on a postal scale (weights, not spoons, since you're making dozens of servings), stored in a one-litre Nalgene. Made in bulk in spring and refrigerated, the sauce lasts an entire season thanks to its salt content and shelf-stable ingredients.
In the field, you dilute the sauce with water in the bottle, shake, decant a share into each pot with the peanuts, add at least 10 ounces of water, crush in the ramen and cook. Two big warnings: boil-overs (the sauce froths violently, so stay attentive and use extra water) and scorching — stir early and often or the peanut sauce burns on the pot bottom before the noodles cook. In smaller groups you can boil the noodles first and stir sauce in at the end to dodge both problems. Red pepper flakes substitute fine for sriracha, and no coconut milk powder? You'll survive.
The bonus is that it's genuinely tasty off the trail too — Skurka keeps a bottle in the fridge as a weeknight standby, ideally upgraded with blackened grilled chicken and vegetables. For anyone planning group hikes, ski tours or even camping trips with a crew, it's a cheap, calorie-dense dinner that beats another freeze-dried pouch — just check for peanut allergies first, because there's no realistic workaround there.
