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Hello hungry hikers! Backcountry nutrition is absolutely critical for a successful hiking trip. After all, you won’t make it far without some good food. But of course, the trick is packing some food that provides sufficient energy without weighing you down. Vegetables, meat, fruit, and other tasty staples unfortunately weigh quite a bit due to their water content. But what if you didn’t need to carry all that water? Enter dehydrated meals…
Dehydrated meals are the complete package with the calories, nutrition, and taste of complete meals, but they’re a fraction of the weight. Once at camp, all you need to do is boil water, add it to the pouch, wait a few minutes, and you have a hot meal ready to go. However, the trick is sifting through the countless brands and meal types out there to find one that tastes great, is easy to prepare, and offers quality calories. With that in mind, I was delighted to test Mountain House’s new Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl, Korean Inspired Beef, and Cheesy Beef Enchilada Bowl recipes this season!
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Mountain House Meals Quick Look
Let’s review the Trail Pants’ basic characteristics before we jump into the full review.
- Price: $11.99/pouch
- Calories:
- Pizza: 740/pouch
- Korean Beef: 580/pouch
- Beef Enchilada: 660/pouch
- Weight: Approx. 4.7 ounces dry
- Intended Activity: Backpacking
Intended Use
The purpose of these dehydrated meals is simple: to allow you to get delicious, warm meals deep in the backcountry without weighing your pack down. All the preparation you need for these meals is to boil water, and that’s it. Just pour the water in the pouch, let it sit for a few minutes, and dinner is served. So all-in-all, these meals are designed to provide a simple, lightweight meal for backpacking trips.
Notable Features
Let’s take a look at what makes these Mountain House meals different from the other options on the market.
Unique Flavors – This latest batch of flavors are bold and new. Pizza is always such a comfort, and bringing a dehydrated pizza dish to the backcountry should delight to many hikers.
Added Texture – So many dehydrated meals have the drawback of always coming out as a mush. A tasty mush, to be sure, but still mush. Mountain House aims to change that here with a perfectly formulated recipe including crispy vegetables in the Korean Beef dish and tender buttermilk biscuit crust for the pizza.
Mountain House Company Background
Mountain House’s parent company, Oregon Freeze Dry, got its start in 1963. Originally, the company focused on freeze drying fruits for breakfast cereals, but the application of freeze drying to harsh and remote environments couldn’t be ignored, and Oregon Freeze Dry began producing meals for the U.S. military in 1966. Soon after, the company began selling leftover freeze-dried rations to the public, and the demand and popularity was overwhelming. To accommodate this demand, Oregon Freeze Dry created the subsidiary that we know and love today: Mountain House. Since those beginnings, Mountain House has continued to refine their offerings, develop new freeze-dried meals (and desserts), and has seen their products support adventures all over the world, and even to the moon with NASA!
THE TEST – QUICK OVERVIEW
I tested these meals on my hungriest days of a 90-mile, 6-day solo backpacking loop along the PCT and the Grand Canyon of the Tuolomne River in Yosemite NP.
I had several very high mileage days, along with significant sun exposure and high elevation. So, proper nutrition was key and these conditions set the perfect stage for testing the Mountain House meals.
The Review
So, now we know the basics of these Mountain House meals. We know what they offer, their main selling points, and Mountain House’s background. Now it’s time to get into the results of my field testing. Below, I’ve listed several categories pertinent to backcountry meals (nutrition, preparation, and so on). For each category, I’ve given a score from one to five, along with firsthand information from my test to back up each score. So let’s see how they did!
Test Score Key
1/5 – Poor
2/5 – Tolerable
3/5 – Fair
4/5 – Good
5/5 – Excellent
Taste – 4/5
All of the meals were quite good, very well seasoned and texture
Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl 5/5: This one legitimately knocked my socks off. It totally scratches the “Pizza Itch” and gives you a good fatty calorie bomb like the real thing. The seasoning was top notch, with a good amount of spice, and the chunks of pepperoni were nice little chewy bits of texture. My ONLY critique is the bread chunks not fully hydrating, which I mention below.
Korean Inspired Beef 4/5: Taste was solid, good flavor and seasoning, and the beef was surprisingly tasty for a rehydrated foodstuff. As mentioned later as well, the beef did not rehydrate 100%.
Cheesy Beef Enchilada Bowl 4/5: It’s a super yummy recipe, with lots of cheese and spice and ground beef and beans. Very much like the real thing. The only critique I had is that it turned into a kind of all-around goop that didn’t leave the distinct flavors of different ingredients intact. I know rehydrating different ingredients is a challenge but if there were a way for it to not all blend together so much this would be a welcome improvement.
I’m also a cheese fiend so I will generally like the recipes with cheese better!
Preparation – 4/5
The meals were relatively easy to prepare. Each bag had slightly different instructions as to amount of time you needed to allow the meal to re-hydrate. Additionally sometimes you needed to open up the bag, give it a good stir, and let it sit a little long.
The challenge I encountered was measuring out the specified amount of water. 1 and 1/3 cups is a very specific measurement you don’t really have the ability to do unless you have a mug or cook set with measuring amounts. My JetBoil had lines indicating 8oz and 16 oz, so I had to estimate the right amount of water. The recipes worked out reasonably well, although the Korean Beef did end up a bit more soupy than I would have intended. A ‘fill line’ on the bag would be great if that could be managed.
Nutrition – 4/5
I’ve given a 4/5 as an average rating, and below, I will rate each one individually and indicate the caloric content which I checked after eating. The higher the calorie content, the more satisfied I felt, and the ratings line up there as well.
Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl 5/5: I was feeling depleted and famished when I grabbed this for dinner, following a 30 mile day with several thousand feet of elevation gain and loss. And man, I tell ya, it HIT THE SPOT. The gooey cheese, the fact that it was quite salty, and the all around good seasoning and high caloric content was just the ticket for feeling satisfied and fueled up for my joints and muscles to rest and recover overnight for another big day to come.
Korean Inspired Beef 3/5: This one left me feeling a little hungry, the rice was very light and there wasn’t enough beef. I wouldn’t go for this one again unless the recipe gets beefed.
Cheesy Beef Enchilada Bowl 4/5: This was a close second to the Pepperoni Pizza Bowl – It was very satisfying.
A side note to this- For someone doing serious miles, the “2 serving” bag is a solid, easily finishable meal for one person. So, the label can be misleading. I can’t imagine being a happy camper if I would have had to share any of these dinners, nor would have wanted a bag with less food.
Packability and Weight – 4/5
Waste & Disposal – 5/5
Once all the food is gone, the bag packs flat for easy storage until I reach a trash can. This is particularly useful when using a bear can, since the empty bags can easily get squished down nice and small at the bottom of the bear can without taking up much space at all.
Alternatively, since the pouches can be resealed, I often use them as a little trash bag for other waste until they’re full, seal them up, and good to go.
So zero complaints in this category!
Price – 4/5
Overall Quality – 4/5
The meals felt very well thought out, and it seemed like I was eating real, quality food.
The only critique I have for quality of the food is that not all the chunks rehydrated, even when following the instructions “to a T”. I set a timer and used either the exact amount of water, or slightly more, and poured into the bag at a rolling boil.
Specifically, in the Pepperoni Pizza bowl, some of the bread chunks were crunchy. In the Korean Beef, some of the beef chunks were crunchy.
With the pizza bowl, I can appreciate the effort to mimic the feeling of biting into pizza dough or crust, but the crunch of the bread bits was a bit off-putting to me. It felt more like a half hydrated crouton than a pizza crust. I would try to make the chunks smaller or rehydrate better.
With the Korean Beef, I can’t imagine the beef chunk crunch could have been intentional, so I’d suggest adding more beef and make the chunks smaller.
Bringing it Together
To make it easy to see what we’ve got here, I’ve brought all the pros and cons into one place below for us to bring this review together.
Pros:
- Delicious
- Easy to prepare
- Lightweight
- Easy to pack out afterward
- Good price
Cons:
- Some ingredients didn’t fully re-hydrate
- Korean Beef left me still feeling a little hungry
Final Thoughts
Overall, I was blown away by the quality and deliciousness of these meals. They were easy to prepare, lightweight for backpacking, and, for the most part, left me feeling nourished and satisfied. I encountered some minor drawbacks around certain ingredients not fully re-hydrating during preparation, which I detailed in the “overall quality” section above, but overall, these meals were outstanding. I also also found the price for these to be reasonable for the quality and calories you’re receiving deep in the backcountry.
I just want to reiterate how brilliant the Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl turned out. I was expecting to be disappointed, and it far exceeded my expectations. The pizza box it shipped in was also a hilarious touch.
Additionally, mountain house sent me a metal spoon. It was really nice to have a spoon with a long handle just the right size to not get my fingers gooey when mixing and eating the meals. It’s a great scraping spoon, and very lightweight. It’s my spoon of choice back home now for scooping avocados cleanly out of their rind. Thanks to Mountain House for sending it and I recommend!
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