Review: Outdoor Gourmet - Tandoori Chicken

This is the third of the pre-packaged instant meals I wanted to cover, following on from the Back Country Roast Chicken, and the Outdoor Gourmet Butter Chicken camping meals and I wanted to go through them all. This is the Tandoori flavoured chicken, which comes with a yogurt sauce.

As with the Butter Chicken, and the Roast Chicken, the pouches are tear open and zip-lock sealable, in order to cook your meal in the same retort you then eat out of. The Tandoori chicken meal includes a sachet of yogurt sauce, which needs to be removed before the boiling water goes in, and is added following the 10 minute "cooking" stage.

There were a number of nice ingredients in the mix, making for a nice variety of textures and tastes in each mouthful, even though, in something that escaped me when I bought them, included red capsicum, which I'm mildly allergic to (but it didn't seem to have too bad an effect). The meals are listed as a 370g serving size, with a 190g net package weight (obviously this equates to the cups of boiled water that goes in).

With that serving size, you are getting 1830kJ (437kcal) from the meal, or at 100g as a reference you are getting 486kJ (116kcal) per 100g. It's a pretty filling meal, but you'd need to have several to make a full days nutrition, or even more than just these to make a complete meal in any given setting. But when you need a flavour filled, hot meal, especially after a long hike, or getting caught in inclement weather,  these might just be the ticket.

The Outdoor Gourmet Company gives a 3 year "best before" on all their products but also state it is safe to eat beyond that, provided it’s stored appropriately and the packaging remains sealed. These could easily sit in a bug-out-bag or in the camping-box of a vehicle for ages without any trouble. They aren't vacuum sealed, but have limited volume and it's no big deal.

Other types of dry food might only last a year or so, but because of their exceptionally low moisture content they handle higher storage temperatures better than most wet-pack meals & higher moisture content dehydrated product. They may need a couple of cups of water to fully rehydrate, but they are delicious.

The zip seal pouch makes rubbish disposal a breeze; you just toss in any other rubbish, roll it up, zip it closed and pop it in your pack.