Like milk. You can buy powdered milk.
Meat requires refrigeration but you can buy canned meat or smoked meat.
What else is there? If you buy jelly it requires refrigeration, but what if you buy the stuff that has peanut butter & jelly in a single jar, does that require refrigeration?
Anything else
Do freeze-dried foods count? If so, you have a fairly limitless number of choices.
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You can also buy ultrapasteurized milk in boxes that doesn’t require refrigeration. It’s much better than the powdered stuff - it tastes exactly like regular milk, and I’m quite fussy about my cow juice.
A better question might be: “What basic foodstuffs that are normally sold in a refregeration-required form, do NOT have a shelf-stable alternative?”.
And in todays world, considering camping food, convenience food, processed food, etc., I think that list is gonna be pretty short if you stay at the level of base ingredients.
Eggs, milk, bread, fruit, meat (any animal flesh), veggies, etc., are all available in shelf-stable (if rather yukky) form. Beans, nuts, flour, sugar, and spices are already shelf-stable for months if not years. Oils, especially the unhealthy ones, are also shelf-stable for months if not years. And that pretty well covers the list of what humans eat.
When you go up the chain to more complete entrees, that’s where the problem is. I doubt you can get a shelf-stable pheasant under glass or baked alaska anywhere. But they do make camping “ice cream” that has the taste & mouth feel of room-temperature real ice cream. OTOH, garden salad is one simple dish that (AFAIK) isn’t available in shelf-stable form.
So I suspect the underlying issue is more one of the complexity of the dish, consumer demand for it in shelf-stable form, & how well it can survive the modifications needed to stuff it into a can, pouch, etc.
Milk can be bought undehydrated.
Ummm… does it? I mean, we’re talking about fruit (or fruit juice) preserved with sugar here, aren’t we?
I can’t believe you think it tastes exactly the same. UHT milk is really very different to fresh milk (I happen to like it, but there’s a real and quite big difference in taste and even in mouthfeel).
Mangetout - to be specific, chilled skim Parmalat UHT milk tastes pretty darn close to the standard pasteurized skim supermarket brand that I’m used to. Perhaps the versions with fat in them differ from non-UHT milk? I could see the fats not surviving the UHT process unaltered, which might change the taste and mouthfeel. Of course, if you’re used to really fresh milk, like straight from the cow, all bets are off.
Possibly; UHT milk does tend to be homogenised, but I also find UHT to have a sweeter, ‘cooked’ taste that I suppose I’d describe as being like very dilute custard.
It won’t spoil, but it doesn’t hold its texture as well.
After you open it, you really should put it in the ol’ chill chest. It’s preserved, yes, but only until it’s opened. The point of fruit preserves (in all their forms) aren’t that you can use it forever without having to chill it, but that you can store it forever (well, not forever, but a while at least). Jelly, jam, etc…are full of sugar, and still have water in them, so they are the perfect breeding ground for bacteria and mold. The uinitla preserving process heats up the preserves to kill any that are currently in the jar, and then seals it up tight so no new ones can get in, thus preseving it. But as soon as you opern that seal, BAM, it’s a bacteria party, so keep it chilled so they are too lethargic to breed.
These are examples of products sold cold and have counterparts that are sold warm but require refrigeration after opening.
Pickles. There are the common brands that don’t require refrigeration prior to opening, and then there’s one or two that do…Vlasic I think is a fridge brand right?
Also, pasta. There are lots of brands that are sold dry, but some others that are found in the cold box.
My problem with the peanut butter-jelly swirl stuff is that I jelly must be refrigerated, but I like my peanut butter at room temperature.
The sugar content of ‘real’ jam is generally too high to support the growth of bacteria and moulds - they grow on the surface where some of the sugar has deliquesced to a more dilute syrup in the presence of atmospheric moisture (the oxygen in the air helps too), but the jam beneath the surface layer usually remains untouched for a long time - the conditions are just not suitable for the bugs to grow down into, even if they wanted to.
Mind you, I live in the UK, so it’s typically not a lot warmer in the cupboard than it is in the fridge, and fresh fruit is only available for two weeks in late August*, so a)jam tends to keep a while in the cupboard and b)it doesn’t stick around long enough to spoil anyway.
*[sup](not actually true)[/sup]