Review: Alpine Aire Ginger Stir Fried Rice with Beef

Product: Alpine Aire Ginger Stir Fried Rice with Beef

Price: $16.95

Store: MEC

Weighing Your Food

It’s essential to weigh your backpack on a scale before leaving for a multi-day trip. My backpack weighed forty-six pounds initially and forty-one pounds when starting the West Coast Trail. It’s a challenging trip making it a slow slog for seven days with a heavy pack. You want to ensure that you have a light pack to make your trip more enjoyable. I wish our packs would have been lighter but it meant bringing fewer snacks (it’s hard to know how much you’ll eat on the trail) and removing equipment (which we decided could have been eliminated after we finished our trip). Food takes up a good portion of the weight so either figuring out how to cook lightweight homemade meals or bringing a variety of different pre-packaged meals from MEC could be a good option. Available pre-packaged meal options could be stir fry, spaghetti, breakfast and dessert.

Lightweight Package

This Alpine Aire Ginger Stir Fried Rice with Beef package is compact and lightweight at 166 g. It was a perfect meal for a multi-day backpacking trip. This was one of the seven exciting meals on the seventy-six-kilometre West Coast Trail trip. I like to bring an additional meal when I’m on a long trip far away from a store. You never know when an injury could occur causing a delay in finishing the trip, you might need a rest day or it’s taking much longer to finish the trip than anticipated. An extra pre-packaged meal might be lighter than a homemade option. It’s a good idea to carry an additional meal in case of emergencies.

Cooking Alpine Aire Rice With Beef Meal

We cooked the Alpine Aire Ginger Stir Fried Rice with Beef in our GSI Escape 2L pot. Our pot is big to allow for homemade meals, but you could have a smaller pot if you were cooking all pre-packaged meals. It was very quick to boil our water with our MSR WhisperLite stove. Once the water boils, pour it in the pouch, completely seal it to prevent any air from escaping and allow it to cook quickly for twenty minutes.

Tip #1: When twenty minutes are up, make sure to open the pouch and mix the contents. Check to see if the rice is still crunchy. If so, reseal the pouch for a bit longer.

Tip #2: Another idea is to make sure that the water covers the entire ingredients so that everything cooks evenly.

The meat and veggie pieces in this meal aren’t very large; it had small pieces of ginger beef, and vegetables. If you would like larger pieces of food, you might want to consider a different pre-packaged meal. Note that it might take longer to cook.

The taste is average. I don’t find it as tasty as my home-cooked meals but when you’re starving after a long day of physical exercise, it’s nice to have a quick meal to eat.

Mental and Physical Preparedness

To make sure you’re fit and that your pack isn’t too heavy for multiple days of backpacking, I suggest trying your backpack for your long trip on a one-night backpacking trip such as the Poboktan trail. See if you can manage your way in and out with your current pack weight. If yes, then great! If it’s significantly too heavy, adjust your backpack weight and reassess which items can be removed to have an enjoyable one-week trip. A pre-packaged meal such as the Alpine Aire Rice Beef can simplify the planning and cooking process and save time by not dehydrating your own meals. It can also provide a fast supper when you’re exhausted from your excursion.

Overview for Alpine Aire Rice Beef

Pros

• It’s fast by pouring boiled water into the pouch and waiting twenty minutes for the meal to cook.
• The package is compact and lightweight.
• An assortment of packages with different types of meals are available.
• It only requires a small pot to boil the water.

Cons

• If you don’t let the meal stand for longer than twenty minutes, the rice could be crunchy.
• The ginger beef doesn’t come in big pieces which means you don’t get that rich meat flavour.
• The taste isn’t fantastic but does the trick in a pinch.

Alpine Aire Rice Beef is Best for:

• A quick supper when you don’t feel like cooking a complicated meal.
• Avoiding the thinking process to figure out what meal to make and dehydrate before your multi-day kayaking or backpacking trip.
• One-week multi-day outdoorsy trips.
• People who only like to carry a small pot.