Good To-Go Instant Meals

Backpacking and camping meals have gone gourmet in recent years. Gone are the days of drab beans and rice; you can now dine on excellent curry or pad Thai in the back country.

Good To-Go is attempting to create gourmet meals to compete with those from other similar producers. Good To-Go crafted four options so far, each of which is vegetarian: classic marinara with penne, Thai curry (technically pescatarian as it includes fish sauce), smoked three bean chili, Indian vegetable korma, pad Thai and herbed mushroom risotto. All four require 1.25 cups of boiling water added to the bag, a stir and a 20-minute wait time.

The water amount can be tough to eyeball, but Good To-Go recently added a fill line that will take away the guess work. The bags reseal with a zip lock, which is great because then you can reuse them as trash bags, or at the very least you don’t have to worry about any remaining contents spilling into your backpack later. And the seal locks in the heat — even 20 minutes later, the bag opens piping hot.

An in-home test of the offerings showed they were packed with flavor and had good texture overall. The mushroom risotto has undergone some improvements but still needs work — it was the least flavorful of the options, lacking salt and was slightly soupy despite careful measurement. The only downside to the Thai curry is the difficulty in opening a second, smaller pouch of coconut powder — it needed scissors, which hikers aren’t likely to carry.

The success of the Thai curry bodes well for Good To-Go. A few tweaks, and a few more meals, and they may well be on their way to producing great backcountry meals.