I bought four or five different ones and on Saturday I just grabbed the one off the top of the bag. It turned out to be Kung Po Chicken with Noodles. I had high hopes that Fuizion Foods would be a cut above the usual freeze dried mush that you get in most camping meals.
The meals come in a silver pouch with instructions for rehydration in English and French.
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| The Fuizion Food packaging |
When you open up the package I have to admit that the dried contents don't look very appetising but don't let that put you off. I had measured the 310ml out before I went out and I knew that it was up to about 1cm from the top of my insulated camping mug so it was pretty easy to measure out and boil in the jetboil.
I added the boiling water to the pouch and gave it a good stir with my spork. You do need quite a long implement for this as the packaging is quite deep but more of that later. I then sealed it up or so I thought. When I went to wrap it in my scarf to keep it warm, I managed to squeeze some of the sauce out and all down my leg. Luckily I had my thick lined trousers on so no damage done.
10 minutes later I had made the coffee and opened the pouch up to see what had developed.
The pouch gets quite warm so would be great to keep your hands warm on a chilly day but not so warm that it can't be handled comfortably. The pouch material also softens quite a bit but it stays rigid enough to hold without it collapsing or wobbling.
The first thing to say is that it smelled great - just like a takeaway so that can't be half bad. The second thing to say is that the packaging is a bit of a pain. It's quite deep and so it's difficult to get at your food. I solved this problem by cutting the top off the pouch with my penknife (or rather Roy did it - I'm not to be trusted with the penknife since I sliced open my finger quite badly halfway up a mountain in Olympic National Park)
After that it was very easy to eat and really really good. It had texture, real taste and great big chunks of chicken that actually tasted like chicken and had the texture of chicken. The vegetables were actually crunchy - how do they do that??? and there was plenty of it. You could even recognise the individual vegetables - mange tout, carrots, baby sweetcorn (although I can do without the baby sweetcorn - it's the product of a twisted mind) We shared it for lunch but for me it would be a good portion for an evening meal after a days walking.
Apparently, the difference between Fuizion Foods and other manufacturers is that they freeze dry all of the ingredients individually and then mix them together ready to be rehydrated. Others make up the meal and then dry it and then break it up into chunks - hence the mush texture and lack of recognisable ingredients. I have now been corrected by Alison from Fuizion foods and I have got it totally wrong! They do in fact make the meal up and then freeze dry it - see comments below. Whatever they do - they do it well and I stand corrected.
Overall we were really impressed with our first Fuizion meal. I understand that they are proposing changes to the packaging to make it shallower and wider which would make it just about perfect. As for price - it's not cheap when you compare it to other camping foods but in this case you really do get what you pay for and if it gives you something to look forward to at the end of a long walk then it's worth every penny. I'll be trying out the other varieties soon so we'll see if they match up to the Kung Po chicken.
Hi Janet
ReplyDeleteI hope you don't mind me posting a comment. I just wanted to say thank you so much for your lovely review of our food, I especially liked the reference to the baby sweetcorn, that did make me chuckle!
I just wanted to correct one of your comments regarding how we make the food, infact we make the food to a normal recipe i.e. combined ingredients, whereas a number of other companies freeze dry all the ingredients seperately and only combine them in the packet.
I also wanted to let you know that we are working on the packet shape, but at the moment we are still a little too small to place a special order for bespoke packets as we would have to order 30,000 at a time, we will however bite the bullet later this year, so that the packet shape will be a little easier to deal with.
Thank you again.
Alison Simmonds
Fuizion Freeze Dried Food Ltd
Great review. What about calorific value?
ReplyDeleteHi there, thanks for that. The Fuizion foods website is excellent in that it gives all of the nutrition value that you need if planning an expedition. For this particular meal it has 553cals, 39g protein, 68.9g carbs (of which 22.9g sugar) 16.9g fat(of which 3.4g saturates) 4.8g fibre and 0.1g sodium. The other meals seem to have a similar calorific value. I particularly like that I recognise all of the ingredients in their meals and they don't read like a list of contents in a chemistry set!
ReplyDeleteThanks Janet - had a look at their site which is excellent as you say. Definitely be trying this on our West to East trip in May.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to take credit for discovering them myself but I got the tip from Terrybnd's blog so the thanks go to him - and to Fuizion foods of course for bothering themselves to come up with such a great product.
ReplyDeleteI am a bit late commenting here (been away for a bit). I had read, albeit in a hurry, of these on Robin's "Blogpackinglight" blog quite a few months ago, but then promptly forgot about them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder, Janet.