Backpacking Meals
Freeze-dried meals that taste good.
This is mostly a note-to-self. I thought it would be useful to make this easily accessible (and now it lives on my website)
Freeze dried meals aren’t very difficult to make. The challenge is finding the ones that taste good. Once you do, making them is easy. You boil some water on a backpacking stove (MSR Windburner), pour some boiling water into the meal bag, mix, and wait. There’s an officially recommended amount of water to use for each meal on the side of the bag. I’ve tried a bunch of meals; sometimes the suggested water to food ratio seems wildly off.
Here are the meals I like, and how much water I use for them:
- Mountain House Pad Thai with Chicken
- I follow the official recommendation: 1 and 1/3 cup
- This meal is by far my favorite and I could eat 4 or 5 of them over the course of a few days before I get sick of it.
- Trailtopia Blueberry Oatmeal
- The official recommendation is 3/4 cup - 1 cup. 1 cup was pretty soupy. I think there is a better texture with 3/4 cups of water.
- Taste is alright. Could use a little extra sugar.
- Peak Refuel Chicken Teriyaki Rice
- Suggested ratio works.
- Not as good as the Mountain House Pad Thai, but not bad!
- ProPak Chicken & Rice
- Slightly less than the suggested ratio – 1.25 cups
- It’s alright! I guess. Nice quantity of food.
- Good To-Go Chicken Pho
- I make this as a noodle dish, not a soup.
- Used ~250mL of water for the double serving while in Seattle. Probably need a bit more water at elevation.
- Firepot Porcini Mushroom Risotto
- Pretty good. Probably needs to be stirred a few minutes in to making it.
- Water suggestion is fairly accurate.
- Trailtopia Ramen Noodles with Chicken Flavor and Broccoli
- Tastes decent. Not a ton of food.
- Water suggestion is accurate.
more to come…
While I’m on the topic of backpacking meals: Kuju pour-over coffee is awesome. One pour-over packet makes ~8-12oz of coffee. The Yeti Rambler 14oz mugs are normally my “indestructible mug” of choice, but they are a bit too wide for the coffee packet to sit nicely on. A mug with a smaller opening would do a better job. I haven’t wanted to buy a different mug, so I just make sure it doesn’t fall in by holding it. It would be super cool to not have to do that though.