Freeze Meal for Hiking

Best Freeze Dried Meals for hiking

Freeze-dried meals aren’t just for astronauts anymore. In fact, they’re some of the most popular meal options for hikers heading into the backcountry. They’re convenient, calorically dense, lightweight, and tasty at the end of a long day. All you have to do is add boiling water, wait a bit, and then eat your delicious meal straight out of the bag. Also, no dirty dishes make for a happy backpacker. 

Ok, before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s probably important to set your expectations. This is not your grandma’s home-cooked dinner; it’s a backcountry meal. Chances are, even if the flavors aren’t quite what you were expecting, you’re going to be hungry enough to wolf it down with a smile. Everything tastes better in the wilderness. That said, we always bring a small container of hot sauce, olive oil, and some salt and pepper packets for when we need to kick a meal up a notch.

There are tons of different freeze-dried meal flavors, and some are better than others. It’s tough to get more subjective than ranking personal food tastes, but we feel like sharing our opinions anyways. We hope this guide helps you upgrade your backpacking food game and find some tasty treats.

Energy-to-Weight Ratio

Many backpackers choose freeze-dried meals because they’re a lightweight dinner option. The process of freeze-drying a meal removes 80% of its water weight while retaining a high level of calorically-dense nutrition. Most meal pouches range between 500-900 calories and weigh around 5-7 ounces. This puts them in the 100-130 calorie-per-ounce ratio, which isn’t spectacular, but is still quite good. 

Are they nutritious?

The process of freeze-drying can retain up to 90% of the nutrients, but the product will only be 20% of its original weight. That said, most freeze-dried meals are packed with sodium and unrecognizable ingredients. Scientifically speaking, we’d put them into the “sorta nutritious” camp. Freeze-dried meals will still do a better job providing a balanced meal when compared to most hiker dinner options, like ramen or instant potatoes. Certain brands, such as Mary Janes Organic and Good To-Go, use all recognizable ingredients or “real food,” which is a step in the right direction in our opinion. 

Cost

Freeze-dried meals are not cheap and there are inexpensive alternatives (mashers, pasta sides, ramen, etc). If you’re spending months on the trail thru-hiking, meals like these will probably be too expensive to be sustainable. But for the casual backpacker, meals like this can add a lot of value, convenience, and enjoyment.

PRO TIP: When you buy 8 or more backpacking meals from REI, you save 10%. We usually stock up for the hiking season. You can also save money by purchasing bulk meal kits.

SQUIRREL RATING SYSTEM

Whenever we go backpacking, we take some of our tried-and-true favorite freeze dried meals. Each trip we also take some new flavors to test out. First established by our dear friend David Branson while hiking the Zion Traverse, the very “scientific” CleverHiker Squirrel Rating System was born.

While consuming new freeze-dried meals, we deliberate about how it tastes and ultimately decide on a squirrel rating. Every meal we eat earns a squirrel rating score between 1 and 5 based on flavor, texture, and overall deliciousness. There are only whole squirrel ratings because half a squirrel would be gross. We update this list every time we put on our snobby food critic pants and stuff our faces in the backcountry.

Without getting too technical, it is also worth noting the two different ways of taking water out of food to render it lightweight and preservable: freeze-drying and dehydration. Freeze-drying involves freezing food to a very low temperature and drying it in a vacuum; dehydration involves passing warm air over the surface of the food inside a commercial dehydrator. Different brands use each approach, but the end results are relatively similar. Summit To Eat and Bla Bland make freeze-dried meals, for example, while Adventure Food and Firepot supply dehydrated food.

So which type should you go for: ready to eat or freeze-dried/dehydrated? This will really depend on the type of adventure you’re going on and what your priorities are. For most adventures such as wild camping, long-distance trekking, and off-grid backpacking, minimizing the weight and size of your backpack is the most important consideration, so freeze-dried/dehydrated meals will definitely be your best bet. Why? Because the lightest freeze-dried/dehydrated main meal reviewed below is just 100g, which is three times lighter than the ready-to-eat meals we tested. If you’re undertaking an intense physical challenge, such as an Ultra, calorie intake is likely to be more important to you. In that case, again freeze-dried/dehydrated is the right choice, with specialist high-energy meals providing up to 800kcal per portion. But if you’re heading to a campsite, or if the price is your biggest motivator, a ready-to-eat meal might suffice.

If we’re going to get really geeky, there are a few other pedantic considerations when it comes to lightweight backpacking meals including rehydration times, how easy it is to get the right consistency, and the stability and size of the pouch. Some meals take only six to eight minutes to rehydrate while others take up to 15 minutes – the latter can feel like a long wait if you’re super hungry. Another downfall with rehydrating meals is that it’s annoyingly easy to put the wrong amount of water in too much and your meal will turn into a soup, too little and it’ll be stodgy and thick. Some brands include a fill mark on the outside or inside of the meal pouch (inside is better) while others simply state the volume of water in ml to add. Finally, pouches that are wider and shorter are simpler to use (it’s easier to get your spork to the bottom, for example, and to mix the ingredients, and the pouch stands up more stably), whereas higher ones tend to be more awkward in general (you’ll probably find yourself getting frustrated as you dig away for that final morsel in the depths of the pouch).

You can buy lightweight backpacking meals direct from some brands’ websites, but for added convenience simply shop at a specialist online retailer. Our favorite is Base Camp Food, which stocks multiple brands, offers free delivery on all UK orders, and has an all-around excellent reputation.