This nearly instant cream of mushroom soup mix is put together using easy-to-find ingredients. It’s perfect for quick, weeknight dinners or lightweight camping!
I happen to have two backpacking cookbooks on my shelf! One was written by my mother (anyone else got a feminist nature-loving mother?), and the other was published by the same publisher as Fermenting Made Simple!
However, neither of them had a recipe for cream of mushroom soup… something that I really wanted to for our trip on the Juan de Fuca trail (mostly because I randomly bought a 5 kg bag of dried maitake mushrooms, and I needed a culinary use). So I decided to create the recipe myself!
It’s based on my mother’s Alfredo Rice Divan recipe… without the ham, broccoli, or rice. So a fairly different recipe. ๐
Not just for backpacking!
Since I had such a large bag of dried mushrooms to use up, I ended up making a lot of instant mushroom soup. It’s a really good “instant” meal for all sorts of occasions:
- Camping & Cabining: While I designed this recipe as a lightweight meal for backpacking, it’s also handy for camping or at an off-grid cabin. A lightweight meal is convenient any time refrigeration is difficult or it’s hard to bring in a week’s worth of food.
- Instant lunch or dinner: Sometimes it’s nice to have an instant meal. While I recommend freezing the dried soup mix for long-term storage… it’s pretty easy to heat up and serve when you need it.
- Gifts: Meal trains are great, sometimes… When my sister had her second child she was given a lot of food all at once, which meant she was forced to eat big meals every night just to prevent them from spoiling. Gifting a instant mushroom soup means it will be available whenever they need it!
Store-bought versus DIY dehydration
I created this recipe to use up my huge bag of mushrooms. And the soup does include quite a few packaged foods. If you want to avoid the salt/preservatives/packaging, it’s fine to dehydrate the mushrooms yourself. You can even make homemade cheese sauce mix!
The recipe recommends using a mix of dried mushrooms. Since I already owned a bag of maitake mushrooms, I decided to dry the rest of the mushrooms myself.
Here’s how to dehydrate mushrooms:
- Wash or brush away any dirt. Cut off any bad spots and the woody portion from the stem.
- Slice the mushrooms in half, or in 1/2-inch (1 cm) slices.
- Follow the instructions for your dehydrator, or dry at 90F (30C) for 2 hours, then increase the temperature to 125F (50C) and continue until fully dry. The mushrooms should be crisp and brittle.
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