An MRE is something I haven't had in a while and Steve1989's latest video interested me in one for dinner tonight. So I did what any normal person would do and searched my closet and the best I could find was a case old brown bag MREs that were produced before I was born. I had some newer MCWs but I reserve those for camping/hiking trips. Of all the menus I found, this one sounded most intriguing: Pork Patties Dehydrated.
Looks fantastic! We've got a pork patty (can anyone tell me why they made the old MRE beef patty and pork patty plural when there's only one piece of it?), cocoa beverage powder, chocolate covered cookies, crackers, applesauce, cheese spread which is almost certainly bad, and an accessory packet.
Army mocha? Surely!
And if you can believe it, the catsup isn't clumped up! I've never seen this in person before -- in my experience they've all been moisturized and clumped together.
As instructed, I added two teaspoons of water and decided to spread some of it on the pork patty. Looks a bit like a meatloaf to me.
Here's everything prepared and truly ready to eat!
With the exception of the cheese spread and applesauce, this one looked almost as good as the day it was made! I decided to rehydrate 3/4 of the pork patty and leave the other 1/4 dehydrated, just to examine the difference. I preferred it hydrated. It almost tasted a bit like fried spam with a subtle bacon flavoring. Pork isn't my favorite but I actually enjoyed this! And the catsup gave it some extra flavor that was something like sweet and sour paprika. It really didn't bear any resemblance to the standard Heinz tomato ketchup.
The crackers were a bit stale but were still tasty enough. The applesauce didn't look great in appearance but it actually didn't taste bad. I think the color makes it look less desirable than it is. The cookies were amazing as always. There are two cookies but in my experience, they are always inseparable since they are basically glued together by the chocolate. I wonder if they were always like that. And the Army mocha was fantastic as always. It's relatively late for caffeine (7:23 PM as I write this) so my hope is that the coffee instant type 1 won't keep me awake all night. I knew I was taking my chances but I couldn't resist.
I had to compress the size of the images in order to satisfy the forum's requirements of not allowing uploads larger than 5 MB. For those that want to see lossless images, you may view them here: www.imgur.com/a/cqdqpia