Equipment Review: Cache Lake Foods
by Morgan MacBain

This spring at the Midwest Mountaineering canoe event, we came across a new item that we had to try: Cache Lake foods. We were impressed by the savory fry breads and the wild rice soup that we sampled. We were even more interested, though, in one of their other offerings: meat products like marinated chicken breasts, turkey ham slices, and turkey hot dogs preserved by a process similar to canning, but packaged in vacuum-sealed plastic containers that can go where metal cans cannot. Ever eager to liberate ourselves from freeze-dried fare, were resolved to include some of the Cache Lake products on our summer Boundary Waters trip.

We tried out three items: the fry bread, an asparagus wild rice soup, and the marinated chicken breasts. All three did well enough that we would use them again, although, as with any piece of equipment, there are some considerations to keep in mind with each.

The Frybread

This cooked up nice and fluffy, and was a great comfort to us the night we had it with the asparagus wild rice soup. Garlic was a component of the spicing, and I found the flavor to be just right, in contrast to many other camp foods that prove too tame for my tastes. No special oven is required to cook this frybread, just your frying pan. Simplicity of preparation is a great boon here—even though we have an oven, sometimes one just doesn’t want to deal with anything that complicated. We did have a bit of difficulty getting the bread to cook completely, but our own inexperience with frybreads was probably to blame. We’d never done one before, because they had never appealed to us. One does have to either dirty a bowl to mix the batter or use the ‘knead it in a Ziploc bag’ method, but fresh bread this easy to make is well worth it.

Asparagus Wild Rice Soup

Cache Lake offers several wild rice soups. We chose this one because my paddling partner and I are both fond of asparagus as well. Its cooking time was pretty good for anything involving wild rice, but it was one of the longer-cooking of our camp meals (aside from baked goods from our oven, which took about twice as long). Cache Lake’s advertising boasts about the generous portion size of their soups, and we were not disappointed in this respect. A package that was supposed to contain two servings actually did make a decent entree for two of us. Its flavor was everything that we expected from an asparagus wild rice soup. This is definitely an item to save for a day when meal prep need not be hurried, but we have plenty of those.

Marinated Chicken Breasts

These are so easy to handle that they almost count as convenience foods. They come pre-cooked as well as marinated, so "cooking" them is really just a matter of heating them up. The preservation process makes them a bit softer than a fresh chicken breast, and you can tear them into pieces with your fingers. I appreciated this one night when I couldn’t find the cutting board. Once cut up, though, the pieces hold together nicely for cooking. We used them in a stir-fry with some fresh vegetables, and to dress up the wild rice asparagus soup. I found the flavor to be comparable to that of a fresh chicken breast, although the texture is a bit different. I would definitely choose these over freeze-dried chicken any time. The marinade imparts a soy sauce flavor to the chicken breasts, and this does create some constraints on their use. This isn’t a big problem for me, but if you don’t like soy sauce you might want to try one of the other meat products instead. I’m hoping that other flavors, or maybe an un-marinated version, will be in the works some time soon.

In general, I was favorably impressed by the Cache Lake foods that I tried, and will be using all of them again on future trips. I usually do have a couple of days during a trip when what I want is Food! Now!, and even boiling the water for a no-cook freeze-dried meal seems like a bother. For this reason, I would not want to rely completely on these items. For my style of camping and tripping they are luxury items, comfort foods to take the chill out of a cold, grey day; to break the tedium camp life; or to celebrate a special event.