Planning your meals before you head out on a backpacking trip is always a bit of a give-and-take situation. If you want to eat something that doesn’t taste like rehydrated cardboard, you’ve typically got to pack some extra weight, but if you want a light pack, you need to stick with dehydrated meals, which limits your options.
It’s not particularly hard to do by any means –you can easily get by with pasta, rice, oatmeal, and other just-add-water meals –but that stuff gets bland and boring really fast. If you want to go a bit more gourmet, check out Good To-Go camping meals.
Unlike Mountain House and other dehydrated meal pouch brands, Good To-Go meals are made by a professional chef. And not just any old chef either — GTG is the brainchild of Jennifer Scism: an accomplished chef, former co-owner of the highly regarded New York restaurant Annisa, and winner of the popular TV show Iron Chef America. She was part of a team that beat Iron Chef Mario Batali in the show’s first season.
After retiring from the restaurant business, she set her sights on a relatively neglected category of food: dehydrated meals. Dissatisfied with the backcountry foods that were available at the time, she founded Good To-Go with her husband David Koorits to offer gourmet dehydrated food entrees for outdoorsy folk.
Right now GTG offers three different dishes: Thai curry, herbed mushroom risotto, and smoked three bean chili. The company’s selection is definitely a bit limited at this point, but what they lack in diversity they easily make up for in flavor. We tried them out for the first time last weekend, and all three were hands down the best food we’ve ever eaten on the trail.
Snag yourself a couple bags before you head out on your next trip. You won’t be disappointed
