Back to Back Issues Page
New Recipes for Your Adventures. Let’s Explore Orzo!
May 02, 2025
Hello Chef,

I’ve served up a lot of pasta recipes here in Trail Bytes over the years—macaroni, spaghetti, linguine, shells, and noodles, so I was happy to receive an orzo recipe last month to add to the pasta collection.

Bobbie’s Orzo & Herb Dinner recipe inspired a week of activity: cooking and dehydrating orzo by itself, combining it with other dried ingredients to make backpacking meals, and cooking it with other ingredients to dry as a whole meal.

Photo: Orzo with Chicken, Peas & Mushrooms in Cheese Sauce.

The new page shows two ways to cook orzo before dehydrating it: like rice or like pasta. I point out the pros and cons of the two methods.

Photo: Orzo cooked like rice with a 2:1 liquid to orzo ratio.

Orzo cooked like rice retains all the starch, so I found a little trick to make it easier to spread it on dehydrator trays without it sticking to itself excessively. That wasn’t a problem with orzo cooked like pasta.

Photo: Dehydrating orzo, peas, and mushrooms cooked together with broth.

The topics on the new page include:

  • Cooking & Dehydrating Orzo
  • Chili with Orzo Backpacking Recipes
  • Tuna Orzo Cold-Soak Salad Recipe
  • Orzo with Chicken, Peas & Mushrooms in Cheese Sauce
  • Bobbie’s Orzo & Herbs One-Pan Dinner

Photos: Tuna Orzo, Green Lentil Chili Orzo, Orzo in Cheese Sauce.

I also received a shared recipe from Bonnie in Oregon for Italian Chicken Noodles with Deconstructed Pesto. She uses bow ties, aka farfalle, for the pasta.

Explore the New Pages:

Backpacking Recipes with Orzo

Bonnie’s Pesto Chicken Farfalle

For next month’s Trail Bytes, I will create a Noodle Round-up page to make it easier to find all the pasta recipes we have on the website. If you have a good pasta backpacking recipe, please share it here, and I’ll include it in the collection.

Photo: Thai Peanut Noodles with Chicken.

How are your dehydration projects and hikes going so far? Dominique and I love to hear your stories and see an occasional photo. We ended up hiking nearly every day in April close to home, taking along our thermos meals as usual. We’re eying the mountains for May, now that the weather is warming at the higher elevations. See you next month.

Freundliche Grüsse,

Chef Glenn & Dominique

Visit my Backpacking Chef Facebook page for the lastest posts. Be sure to "follow" the page to continue seeing posts.

If you received this newsletter from a friend and would like to subscribe (it's free), subscribe here.


Back to Back Issues Page