What’s the best tasting freeze-dried to have with you out in the woods?
Well, of course, the real answer is any food tastes pretty good out in the sticks…especially if you’ve been out more than a few days. However, not all backpacking foods are created equal. On our recent 7-day wilderness float trip in Alaska, K-Dawg and I had a chance to put two of the main brands, Backpacker’s Pantry and Mountain House to the test…kinda of a cage match of backpacking food!
Taste Test
For our little impromptu test, we sampled only dinner entrées and ate a mix of classic Americana comfort food dishes, Italian staples and some Asian favorites.
Pad Thai was our favorite of the Backpacker’s Pantry (BPP) offerings and it had a nice spicy peanuty tang to it with a hearty finish.
But the overall flavor edge went to Mountain House (MH). The MH meals were constantly our favorites and for the trip’s top dinner, it was a toss-up between Sweet & Sour Pork, Pasta Primevera and Chicken Breast with Mashed Potatoes.
Incredibly, those whole chicken breasts (with grill lines, even!) rehydrated amazingly well though they come out of the package looking like a brick. The Sweet & Sour could have only been topped by replacing the “parts is parts” pork with that yummy chicken. The sauce in the Pasta Primevera was really tasty and the veggies helped us from getting scurvy since we didn’t have any Tang with us…
Ease of Preparation
I know, I know…all you have to do is boil some water to make a freeze-dried meal and any monkey can do it, but there’s still something to be said for a dinner that cooks up as quickly and easily as possible — especially when your blood sugar is about to crash because you’ve been rowing and fishing from dawn until midnight and the mosquitoes are as thick as black tire smoke.
Again, MH gets the nod in this department. Most of their meals were the simply add water variety while some the BPP dishes required a little more work…ie…add water, let stand, then add packet of other stuff later. The real bottom line here is the added step wasn’t that big of a deal; it was the extra time that it took. It was only a few minutes more to prepare the BPP’s but when you haven’t eaten for 15 hours…
In the End
Of course, we’re splitting hairs here…I mean, 7 days into an Alaskan trip, and stuff like leather gloves start looking tasty. But, based on our last trip, both K-Dawg and I agreed that Mountain House would be the only brand we’d take on the next wilderness mission…
