A Week With Mountain House Scrambled Eggs and Bacon
Camping food runs in two very different veins. One is better than food you can eat at home and includes things like meat cooked over the campfire, s’mores and dutch oven cobblers. The other is food that doesn’t taste as good as food at home, but it’s light or easy to make. The Mountain House Scrambled Eggs and Bacon definitely fall into the second category and after a week of eating them on our trip to Quartzsite, Arizona, I am glad to get back to freshly cracked eggs on my stove at home.
Utah is a Mecca for freeze-dried food, so all I had to do was drive to the nearest survivalist store to find a large can of the eggs. I had tried a small package of them to verify that they were palatable and I was ready to get SIXTEEN servings in a big package for our upcoming trip.
Their estimate of sixteen servings, is a little optimistic. Each serving is 2/3 of a cup, but that serving is a tad small for a breakfast. Unless you’re supplementing it with something else, a healthy adult isn’t going to feel ready to start their day on that serving. I ended up using one cup servings and that worked much better for me.
I can’t complain about the ease of use. All I had to do was boil water, add it to the serving of eggs, stir and wait ten minutes. It was FAR easier to store the eggs, even though I had enough servings for the two of us to last all week. to do the same with fresh eggs, it would have taken half our cooler.
No matter how long I left the eggs in the hot water, however, they never reached the proper texture for eggs. They were large and fluffy, but they didn’t chew quite right. They always felt a little crunchy, even if I left them in the water for fifteen minutes. There was always a little bacon flavored water left over in the bottom of the bowl. That’s because I usually added more water than they recommended in the desperate hope that the eggs would miraculously have the texture of fresh eggs. The water at the bottom gave me the impression that I was eating egg soup, which strangely was okay with me and I gladly lapped up the tasty water out of my bowl at the end of my meal.
The smell of the eggs was good. It had a liquid smoke scent that I supposed came from the bacon bits. I came to enjoy the scent of it each morning, but Mike said it was disgusting. Of course, he refused to even try them, so I couldn’t really take his opinion into account.
Scrambled Eggs with Bacon is really a misnomer. I would have named it Scrambled Eggs with Bacon Bits. Strangely, most of the bacon bits sunk to the bottom of the can, so the later servings had more bacon than my first few breakfasts. No matter how much bacon, I had in my bowl, however, I wouldn’t really consider it enough to warrant inclusion in the name of the food. Maybe a better name would have been Bacon-Flavored Eggs.
Would I eat them again? Yes, most definitely. They made my camping breakfasts easy and trouble free. Instead of worrying about cleaning pans, all I had to do was boil some water. In fact, since we had electricity at our campsite, all I needed to do was turn on my little electric kettle. The fact that they are so portable and easy make them the best thing for a camping breakfast.
Would I eat them at home? Probably not. As easy as they are, they just don’t taste good enough to eat at home when I have a fridge full of fresh eggs to choose from. If we were in an emergency situation (such as the local populous worry about constantly), then I would be grateful that they were available, but as long as I have easy access to fresh eggs, an electric stove and a dishwasher, there is absolutely no reason to dip into that can.