>>1851216They're old school travel food by default, they keep well even in the heat, and are lightweight calorie-dense, and are robust to being squeezed in a bag.
I just did a 6 day hike in up to 37C/98f heat, and my base food was a block of Bayonne ham and a block of Osso-Iraty (hard sheep cheese).
Hard cheeses have all the same attributes as listed above. One thing though, when hot these food "sweat", they render fat, are are super greasy to the touch so you want to have them well packed , ideally in a sous-vide/ziplock, wrapped in wax paper (not sure how you call it english, like plastified paper used by butchers)
I agree with
>>1851249 on one point though, the industrial tastes like shit and is depressing if you eat it day after day. Not to fall in the basic ant-burger, but I hiked in the US and most of what you can get as "ordinary" quality there is absolute dogshit".
I'm Yuro, quality cured meat (saucisson, grisons, serrano, bayonne, etc...) and cheese (comte, osso-iraty, beaufort, tomme, etc...) are pretty commonplace, and decent quality for reasonnable prices even in supermarkets, but the same quality in the US is ultra-premium handcraft level, way too expensive to make sense as hiking food.
I think you'd have a better chance going with jerky for reasonnably priced quality products in the US.
Or you could spend 40$ on a dehydrator and make your own. May seem overkill, but if you hike at least once a month, you'll definitely make up the spend on saving by making your own jerky.
Pic related: Jambon de Bayonne and Osso Iraty I took for my last outing. In the pic you ahve 600g gramms of each, 100g of each perday, roughly 650kcal total perday. Block of ham was 20€ and cheese 12€. Not budget food, I treated myself,but not insanely pricey either, provided you don't eat only that.
