Lunch
A complicated meal
When it comes to outdoor breakfasts and dinners, the market offers plenty. Lunch, however, gets a bit more complex. Off the trail, we have full evening meals for lunch. On the trail, cooking full meals for lunch and carrying perishable food isn’t practical. Online and in outdoor lunch books, you might come across some not-so-great stories – wraps filled with Snickers or a slice of salami with mayo. Honestly, when hiking, everything tastes good, but a wrap with salami and mayo won’t fill us up enough.
Therefore, we’ve decided to skip lunch altogether and opt for high-calorie snacks throughout the day. On this page, we share our recommendations and nutrient scores. Feel free to swap snacks or order them differently. Keep in mind that for long-distance trails in the future, we send food parcels, so we won’t bring 30+ packages of each product below at once.
Energy bar / Cookie
Ever since one of our initial hikes together, we’ve been big fans of the Dutch brand Globetrotter. They produce fantastic outdoor meals, and they also distribute the fruitkek. A fruitkek is a small pink package weighing 100 grams, containing around 6 cookies. Each package provides about 500 calories. When paired with some water, a fruitkek quickly fills up your stomach!
If getting fruitkeks is challenging in your country, we suggest checking out bars from Cliffbar or Powerbar as alternatives.
Nuts
For our next break, we typically have 100 grams of a homemade nut mix. Previously, we carried bags of salted nuts, but during hikes lasting three weeks or more, they become monotonous. Hence, we opted to purchase bags of various nuts, mix them, and store them in zipper bags. Our mix includes salted, cashew, cocktail, and Chinese nuts. However, making your own mix with your preferred nuts is ideal. Be sure to check the nutrient score and aim for the maximum calories within those 100 grams.
Dried Sausage
This might sound unusual, but it’s by far our favorite. We typically bring a dried salami sausage and a dried cervelat sausage. With 500 kcal for every 100 grams, it’s a highly calorie-dense snack, and it tastes delicious. The only requirement is to bring a knife and have a small cutting surface (we try to share it as fairly as possible between the two of us).
CANDy
This one doesn’t revolve around consuming as many calories as possible. It’s meant for well-deserved moments of pleasure on the trail. For some reason, candy tastes exceptionally good when we’re hiking. Typically, we have 5 pieces of candy each per day. Winegums are probably our favorite, but we like to mix it up with frog or peach candies. Honestly, any candy works as long as it’s tooth-breakingly sweet.