Many freeze dried meals are OK and some pretty good, but many are really bad.

Last year with the church youth group we were given some freeze dreid Beef Stew by the outfitter-I will not name the brand. It was so bad no one could not eat it.  I took a youth with me to the far end of Bat lake, well away from any campsites, to bury the whole lot. There was enough stew to feed 7 people and probably more and we had to bury the whole pot. It took a big hole to get it down far enough to make sure it did not leech to the surface. If you are on Bat Lake this year and you see a big fat bear-he might have found the stew and dug it up.

Yuck!

"You can bet your beef stew will come up in conversation."

Maybe not the greatest choice of phrasing there TB!

LOL

Quote:

This one wasn't terrible, but in the same respect it has never made the menu again.  AND bogwalker's story made me think of it because it, too, is beef stew.

The story is simple enough.  I saw "Stew Starter" on my grocer's shelf and figured to give it a go.  I bought stew meat and figured to dehydrate it.  Well, I didn't want to dehydrate it "as is", I thought it would go bad with out a preservative in it like salt.  So, I marinaded it, much like jerky, using soy sauce.  Dehydrated it the next day.  It came out good.

Now fast forward to the BWCA and the night we are going to cook it.  I figured that I'd have to rehydrate the meat for at least an hour.  I did.  It was still hard.  I had little choice than to procede because I looked at the directions for the Stew Starter and it said something like, "Bring to a boil and then simmer for four hours".  FOUR HOURS!!!

Well, it was about 5:00 pm.  Not only would supper be late.  I'd have to cook it on a fire because there was no way I was going to burn up four hours of stove fuel to cook this. 

Well, I had to get a fire going.  I had to tend the fire.  I had to collect additional fire wood. I had to be inventive to come up with food to appease the rioting masses while it cooked.

Finally it was done and served.  It looked good.  The meat, however, was still more than chewy, but the worst part was the salt content.  This stuff was saltier than movie theater popcorn!  The salted meat, along with the already high sodium content of the Stew Starter was enough to launch all of our blood pressure numbers through the roof.

We managed to choke it down but had to drink a few gallons of water each.

It was way too much work at home.  It was way too much work in camp.  It took way to long to prepare.  And it was way too salty. To this recipe I say ... NEVER AGAIN!

About eight years ago I took my now wife to West Virginia's Cranberry Wilderness for her first backpacking trip. Since this was a spur of the moment 4-day trip, and I didn't have a lot of time to prepare, I took a couple of prepacked freeze-dried meals I had in my equipment box.

The first freeze-dried meal was okay but the second, which we ate on our last night out, was horribly and unedibly stale. Upon closer inspection of the packaging, I found a number of small pin holes from it being carelessly tossed around the gear box for a couple of years.  I guess air got in and did it's thing. My future wife was not amused since, when I backpack, I never bring extra food and we went to bed with only a handful of gorp.

She still brings it up!

Chuck

How can anyone compete with the grotesque nature of instant eggs?

I think that those are the real weapons of mass destruction!