Watch this before you buy Mountain House or ReadyWise freeze dried food!

welcome to equip to endure i'm rusty today we're going to be talking about freeze-dried food and popular options you can buy at stores near you so what is freeze drying freeze dyeing also called cryo-desecration is a process of freezing food and then extracting the ice from that food similar to dehydration the difference is with dehydration you're heating the food up to dispel the water and the vapors one of the reasons that people like freeze drying so much more than dehydration is because it leaves so much more of the nutrients in the food it is very lightweight and it stores like 10 times longer than dehydrating or canned food so it's a very popular option particularly among backpackers and it's a great option to have in your food storage supply particularly for your plan to leave your home if you need to so what we're doing today is comparing a couple popular options we have the ubiquitous mountain house option which you'll see in costco in walmart and all over the place and ready wise which is a rapidly surging company that you might have even seen their ads on your facebook feed already so we're going to compare comparable meals so we have a stroganoff option that we're going to compare against the ready-wise stroganoff and we have an apple crisp option from mountain house that will compare against the apple cinnamon cereal from ready wise and then what we're going to do is just try a couple other options that look good to us so we want to see how they taste so on the mountain house side of things we have spaghetti with meat sauce and rice and chicken and for ready wise the southwest rice and beans and pasta alfredo look like something we wanted to give a try to one of the reasons again why these meals are so popular for backpackers is because they are so light and all you have to do is add boiled water now what that enables guys like ultralight backpackers who try to get their base weight down as low as possible they love meals like this because they can have an ultralight stove something like this or a jet boil if you're familiar with the jet boil or even if you're more a little bit of a bush crafter and you like using real wood to cook your food the emberlit option this is the titanium model all you have to do is boil water and then pour it into the pouch and seal it now with the ready-wise options that we got in our kit we need to mix these and cook these in a separate container not that big of a deal but we're going to go ahead and prepare these and then get to taste testing all right so we're back with the results we followed the manufacturer's instructions precisely and we have probably some unwanted results but that's what this channel is about so we're going to talk about it and not pull any punches i've got chris our equipped indoor team member who's going to help me with the taste test and quality perceptions on this so we're going to go ahead and get going chris come on over all right just so you know chris has a cool military background he doesn't like to talk a lot so we'll see how much we get out of them my wife thinks i talk a lot okay so here we go now first off for me the reason that i want to have freeze-dried meals is if i got to go so if the governor issues an order hey guys you've got to evacuate there's a fire coming whatever the issue we want a lot of nutrition and a lot of place that's light that we can go now the problem with the ready wise is the bucket that it comes in is great but the actual food packages are simply that they're almost like potato chip bags what this requires is that you have another container to pour them in and a lid for that for them to for them to heat up and reconstitute whereas with a mountain house backpacking bed it's all in one place so you just pour the water in seal it up and you're good to go that requires less utensils less pots and pans and as chris made the point is if you were eating on the go if you had to eat in the car you don't want the stuff sloshing all over you so it's nice to have in one contained little bag any other thoughts on that no really surprised at how uh how nice the mountain house looked compared looked compared to the uh ready-wise so i guess we'll try to taste it and see what happens so real quick on that we followed the directions we put in as much water as they said we actually let it sit longer than they said to hopefully get it to reconstitute more and this stuff from the most part is just like soup now right off the bat my impression of this is when i have stroganoff i want it to be creamy not runny and this is like soup so let me get a bite of this it's immediate impression it's like it's not even it's not even real food that's pretty bad that's almost like thick let me let me it's watered down noodle i was gonna say it's like thick ramen noodle with onion and chive infused water yeah that's pretty bad i wouldn't i wouldn't if i'd have to be starving to eat it well i i wouldn't have to be starving but that would not be my go-to for it i'm going to give that one a thumbs about right about there medium down okay you're straight thumbs down okay so let's do the stroganoff from mountain house okay so again this is a nice self-contained unit cleanup's easier think about that if you're on the go and you're in a stressful situation you want to be sitting out on the side of the road cleaning pots and pans right okay so just as far as appearance goes right off the bat that looks more constituted and that looks like what i'd expect stroganoff to look like a creamier version this thing still has an aftertaste wow okay yeah this is actually looks like something you make out of your kitchen all right that's true that's actually pretty dang good okay so this is stroganoff against stroganoff it's not even comparison would you eat that willingly every week for a meal you could you could serve this at dinner and then pass as a normal cooked meal in your kitchen yeah i won't argue with that this is like your kids had gone upstairs and started a science experiment he's maybe a little more that's that's not good man okay um as far as texture that's good as far as flavor that's good and as far as again the the actual container i prefer that but i actually want another bite of that that's pretty good if we messed this up because we cooked it then that's on them because we follow the instructions while we were cooking up chris made the comment that we might be the first guys that actually tried cooking ready wise because a lot of people buy these kind of meals and they just put it in their basement and they forget about it right it's there for an emergency but that's why we tested it and it's a good thing we did because chris was actually about to buy several boxes of either or of these but he wanted to wait till he did the test so let's finish this before you make your comments okay so that's pretty good pretty good okay so next the simmer the simmerable the similar one we had apple crisp okay so this is the apple from red here it is so ready wise this was the apple cinnamon cereal so let's try that out it's not bad that just reminds me of those little uh oatmeal packs we used to eat as a kid you know with a little cinnamon syrup thing that you add on it yeah that's not bad that's edible yeah that's way better than that one so here's something that i'm curious about on the preparation directions for these um this one only required i think it was one and a third cups of water to be added but these other ones ask for four cups so either they never tried making it themselves or they they put the wrong amount of water is it really yeah okay so this is like real food real food [Applause] all right first of all what would you give this one as a grade i'll give that a man that's a matter for me for this yeah i mean it was it was edible but well you're just saying that now because we already tried this new one let me try they cost about the same at costco all right so literally like this is this is legit dude i'll give that a uh i'll give that a between a man a thumbs up it's it's good well comparatively it's way it's it's better but all right would you eat this would you be happy to eat this in an emergency absolutely okay yeah all right so those were the two overlaps that we had the stroganoff and the apples so now what we wanted to do is just try two other options from each that looked appealing so let's start with you wanna do the alfredo yeah let's try that for you this one's actually thick but you cooked it so here's what happened i had this one in a container and it was soupy like these other two and so i just turned the heat back on to cook it more to cook more of that water out of there or to help constitute it i'm i love alfredo i like to make it myself from scratch with real parmesan and cream yeah that's the parmesan dried parmesan that kind of just tastes a little weird nope hold on let me try them it's like cheese flavored water that's after you cooked it yeah and that it's not creamy it's almost like just a um it's almost like just flour mixed in with water yeah all right so i'm gonna give that one up i would rather not eat it where are you at yeah i might have to go thumbs down on that one straight up too all right do you want to do the spaghetti with meatballs or the rice and chicken let's do spaghetti okay so this one is not quite well no it's about as thick as the other ones but it's almost more like a almost like a chef boy rd consistency there it's not the best spaghetti but it's it'll pass that's actually better than i was thinking it would be because the tomato actually has a good flavor in that sauce it doesn't have a um like a fake chemically kind of tomato flavor that's actually pretty decent all right this one let's try it i don't want to it's already thick i don't want to get too graphic on the camera here but if you were to look at this i mean that almost looks like uh what you'd see the morning after a bad mexican restaurant meal if you know what i'm saying i got four whole beans on this one all right so this is supposed to be southwest rice and beans from a flavor standpoint i don't think it's terrible the consistency is what ticks me off man because if i got this i'd want rice and beans you know but this is like a soup yeah they're all soup the other issue is that's not as bad i could never feed any of these to my kids really no they wouldn't need any of it they would eat each one of those you could you could pass off with something you just made i love these man so i'm going to give the rice and beans a i'm going to give it a mess your straight thumbs down thumbs down on all of them okay spaghetti and we had that meat sauce did we rate this one already i'm going to go right about there for the spaghetti your man it was decent all right so we did all those next is the rice and chicken i think this is our last one right yep okay so i'm gonna mix that up a little bit that's another nice part guys the utensil wise you can just mix it up with your hands now already this feels so much more solid yeah i mean here let me stir it up this looks like what i would hope the rice on the beans would look like but that looks like almost fried rice or something that looks like constituted rice they put like a lot of chicken stock or bouillon in there and it tastes it's got real it doesn't taste like that top ramen type chicken flavoring i'm surprised rusty because i was gonna buy a bunch of ready wise because i just thought it was more meals but i'm i wouldn't even eat this stuff maybe the directions aren't right and maybe there needs to be some tweaks of the recipe because overall the amount of water that was said to put in there made basically soups instead of the meals flavor-wise i don't know how much would have been resolved by the the right consistency but the ingredients overall didn't taste as high caliber or high quality um the manufacturers of mountain house is called the uh what is it organ like organ freeze dry organ freeze dry and they white label it and they sell it and we think that's what mountain house is we're not sure about ready wise they might make it themselves all right so now overall beyond the actual taste and quality of the food while we were preparing it it really stood out to me how much i prefer these for the intended purpose right if you got to go right you're going to grab your aqua brick and you're going to grab some freeze-dried meals or whatever else you have to go and the more simple it can be and the better it constitutes the better so for me i prefer the backpacking pouches to go with my water supply this requires extra pots extra pads extra utensils extra serving containers and it didn't it's not as appealing as a meal so for me for chris i assume absolutely 100 mountain house 100 mountain house all right thank you for joining us on equip to endure if this was your first time visiting us you have a place in our community go ahead and hit the subscribe button jingle that notification bell that way you can be notified when we post a new video whether you are brand new to this topic of self-reliance and emergency preparation or you're a seasoned grizzled vet in it we want you to be part of the community and until next time in omnia paratus chicken and rice buddy see if you like this do you like it look at this smile this is supposed to be beans and rice he's humming happily after the first [Music] place this is rice and chicken would you eat that if if we had to pack up and leave the house would you eat that it's yummy um i think it's healthy oh you think it's healthy she's health conscious all right e2 leaders whoever puts the best comment down below we're going to send you an opened box of ready wise network that's funny

Channel: Equip 2 Endure

Views: 219,091

Rating: 4.9122896 out of 5

Keywords: Freeze Dried Food, Self Reliance, Emergency Preperation, Survival, Mountain House, Ready Wise

Id: tKyisFHDWTc

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020