6 Practical Tips For Hostel Cooking
As budget travellers, I like to think that we can stretch our hard-earned dollars as far as possible to make our trips last longer. If any luxuries can be cut from our costs, they’ll be unceremoniously disposed of and left for the not-so-frugal people to enjoy.
Cooking our own meals is the number one way we cut costs. Why spend $30 on a restaurant meal when we could spend less than $10 at the grocery store?
When I put together the budget for our backpacking through Europe I accounted for us making our breakfasts plus one other meal per day in our hostel. Sampling the local cuisines was also important to us so we ate out occasionally, but tried to stick to street food and cafes most of the time to keep costs low.
Hostel cooking can be unpredictable. We had a mix of great success and absolute failures in many of the places we stayed. We learnt the best tricks for simple meals and what to look out for in grocery stores to make the experience easier.
Hostel Cooking Tips
Here are my 6 tips to make hostel cooking a breeze.
1. Make single servings
Unless you’re planning to stay for a while, leftover ingredients in the fridge will probably get thrown away. And if you do have leftovers, there’s also the chance of Hostel food theft. Making single serving meals ensures you’re not paying for food you won’t eat.
If you’re travelling solo, you could buy tinned soups or packet meals to serve one. Or if you’re travelling with a partner or friend and cooking together, buy only the amount of fresh ingredients you require for your meal.
2. Carry around non-perishables
Rice or pasta can be paired with a jar of curry or pasta sauce for a quick meal. We carried around quinoa and rice, and breakfast foods such as granola or quick oats for porridge.
Packets of dry ingredients can easily be rolled up and fastened with rubber bands (or hair ties, if you’re like me and don’t have rubber bands handy) to take up less room in your bag.
3. Choose recipes with minimum ingredients
If you usually make recipes with more than 5 ingredients, you may find it’s a struggle to make them. Hostels will usually supply the bare minimum of cooking oil, salt and pepper, but it’s best to presume they’ll have nothing. We purchased an Arrabbiata spice mix (to this day I don’t know what spices are in it, the ingredients are all in German) and I used it in pretty much everything to add flavour.
You can easily make a meal with only 2 or 3 ingredients. Frozen vegetables, stock, and rice? Voila, risotto! Packet ravioli and tinned tomatoes? Instant pasta meal!
There was one time when we purchased bread rolls, dip, and cherry tomatoes, and just dunked the bread and tomatoes straight into the dip for an instant sandwich (kind of – it’s the same ingredients, right?).
4. Ensure your meal requires minimum utensils
Try and purchase food items that won’t require many tools to prepare, and remember to check the kitchen first to discover what tools you have available.
In Bali our ‘kitchenette’ happened to contain no utensils whatsoever. I ended up using a butter knife to haphazardly hack to a tin of taco sauce until I made a hole big enough to extract the liquid trapped inside.
I have also used a butter knife for peeling and slicing vegetables when our Air BnB apartment in Paris failed to have a chopping knife and peeler stocked in the tiny kitchen. Sometimes you’ve just gotta make do with what you’ve got.
5. Be a vegetarian
I don’t want to be the kind of person that pushes vegetarianism on people, but it sure makes hostel cooking a whole lot easier when you don’t have to bother cooking meat.
You could try to have meat only when you eat out, or if you absolutely need it in every meal (I don’t know why you would, but some people get weird about eating meals without it) you could mix in tins of shredded fish or chicken.
6.Take plastic cutlery and food containers
We purchased a small food container to store some leftover salad. Afterward I used it to store tea bags, our random spice mix, stock cubes, and other assorted cooking bits that could be of use in future cooking experiences.
Plastic cutlery also comes in super handy if you want to take a packed lunch out and about with you.
What do you really need for hostel cooking?
Three months of hostel travel taught me that to make a meal, you require very little. You don’t need a fully stocked kitchen or fridge, you don’t need a bunch of fancy utensils, and you don’t need elaborate cooking skills – all you really need is a little creativity and the ability to improvise.
Guest Post
This post was written by Ashlea, a 26-year-old colourfully clothed and excitable vegetarian who loves photography, cooking, and exploring the world. Currently blogging from Sydney, Australia, she lives a minimalist lifestyle and spends the majority of her modest income on whatever trip she’s planning next. Check out her blog or follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
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In Bali, our so-called “kitchenette” was completely devoid of any and all cooking tools. In the end, I had to resort to randomly hacking away at a can of taco sauce with a butter knife until I produced a hole in the can that was sufficiently large to allow me to remove the liquid that was trapped inside.
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If you’re brave enough to skip luxury hotels for hostels, then network barriers are nothing to us, right? The mindset of a budget traveler is to find their own way, like turning to Unblocked Games for entertainment whenever the hotel’s Wi-Fi blocks everything. Anything free and still high-quality is our top priority; saving money for interstate bus tickets is much better!
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These are great tips — the “buy a few versatile staples when you arrive” one saved us so much money on a month-long Southeast Asia trip; a jar of local chili sauce made even the blandest hostel pasta feel like a real meal. I’d add: always travel with a small container of salt and pepper, because hostel kitchens never have seasoning and it transforms everything. On the photo side, I’ve started sketching out the food shots I want from each destination beforehand using AI image prompts to figure out plating and backgrounds, so I’m not fumbling with my phone while the food goes cold. Packing a spork is genuinely a life-changer too. Great practical list.
Great practical tips — fully agree that cooking your own meals in hostels is the single biggest budget lever when backpacking, and the point about planning around a few versatile staples rather than complicated recipes is spot on. I also found that keeping a visual list of simple meal ideas on my phone helps a lot when you’re staring at an unfamiliar hostel kitchen. Lately I’ve been using an AI image generator to sketch out quick meal-planning visuals and travel-food prompts before a trip — browsing a gallery of GPT Image 2 prompt ideas gives me inspiration for easy hostel dinners I can throw together with basic ingredients. Pairing that kind of planning with your cost-splitting advice keeps food costs way down without eating instant noodles every night. Would love a follow-up on cheap staple meals that work in minimal hostel kitchens!
Spot-on advice — the staples-over-recipes mindset is exactly how we keep food costs down on long trips, and splitting groceries with other backpackers is a genuinely underrated money saver. One thing that helped me is visualizing quick meal ideas before I shop so I don’t overbuy in an unfamiliar supermarket. I’ve started sketching those little meal-plan visuals with an AI prompt gallery — browsing copyable AI image prompts gives me fast inspiration for simple hostel dinners using whatever basics are cheap locally. It turns vague “I’ll figure it out at the store” into an actual plan. Pairing that kind of prep with your budget tips keeps things tasty without blowing the daily budget. Cheers for the practical write-up!
Love the tip about making breakfast plus one other meal in the hostel — it really adds up. Also, if you’re curating travel playlists for the kitchen vibe, a playlist name generator can help name them in seconds.
Buying single-serving ingredients and planning around a few versatile staples is excellent advice, especially when hostel fridges are crowded and leftovers can disappear. I would add one lightweight container for storing chopped ingredients and a tiny seasoning kit. For people documenting a trip, an AI Video API for Developers can help turn short market and cooking clips into a consistent travel sequence, but the practical food plan still has to come first.
Planning one hostel meal per day is a sensible budget rule because it leaves room for local street food without letting restaurant costs take over the trip. The warning that hostel kitchens vary is important too; a meal built around one pan and ingredients that travel well is safer than a complicated recipe. This would make a useful before-and-after travel story in an AI video generation workspace: grocery stop, shared kitchen, then the finished plate.
The mention of making single servings caught my eye. It’s true, when traveling, who wants to deal with food theft? Plus, carrying around quinoa and rice seems like a smart idea. I can imagine cooking up a simple meal after a long day exploring – sounds oddly satisfying, doesn’t it? Who knew hostel kitchens could be so ingenious!
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These are such smart tips for stretching a travel budget! I love the idea of planning for breakfast plus one meal at the hostel. It’s a game-changer for saving money, and it leaves more room for fun experiences (and street food).