Mountain House Meals
Mountain House is one of the best-known brands of freeze-dried meals in the United States and has proved extremely popular. The brand is now available in the UK, and is manufactured here by European Freeze Dry (part of the group which owns the Mountain House brand).
We've tasted all of the current UK range and are pleased to report they are just as good as their American cousins (which Chris has used and enjoyed in the United States). Mountain House meals typically have great natural flavours, resulting from the extensive use of natural ingredients rather than artificial additives.
Mountain House meals are all of the "cook in the pouch" type: simply add boiling water, close the pouch and wait 8 to 10 minutes. The portions are good. Pricing is a little higher than other brands, but we believe the superb flavour means they are worth the extra cost!
Particular favourites of ours are the Chicken Tikka with Rice (a great British classic: good-sized chunks of chicken breast with rice, tomato and onion in a delicious spicy tikka curry sauce) and Pasta with Lasagne Sauce (pasta and minced beef in a really good tomato, onion and herb sauce with mozarella, ricotta and cheddar cheese: Chris's personal favourite). For these meals in particular, we felt it would be hard to believe they were freeze-dried food in a blind tasting!
The two hot desserts (Custard with Mixed Fruit and Custard with Apple) feature sweet, tasty custard with juicy fruit pieces. To eat these at their best, we recommend adding the water gradually and mixing them very thoroughly.
For ingredients and nutrional information on Mountain House products, please click here. This is an Adobe Acrobat PDF file; most computers will open this kind of file directly, but you can obtain the free Acrobat PDF Reader from www.adobe.com if you don't have it.