Showing posts with label ration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ration. Show all posts

Friday, October 5, 2018

Review: PRC Compressed Ration Biscuts

I was lucky that one of my contacts Jayson Moloney of Blade and Stone AU started stocking a very unique product I had to get in on. These are a long shelf-life survival ration biscuit that looks to provide long term reliable food source as an emergency backup, much like the Mainstay Survival ration bricks I've reviewed in the past.

The rations, produced by ;Qinhuangdao Ocean Food CO.,LTD.formerly known as the Chinese people’s Liberation Army No.4003 factory a supplier for the Peoples Republic of China's military, https://qhdhysp.en.alibaba.com The rations themselves are in the form of compressed biscuits individually wrapped and stored in Mylar foil bags. The 4kg tin carries 20x 200g vacuum wrapped packets. When kept in optimal storage conditions; stored at normal temperature in a cool, dry place they have a minimum 24 month shelf life.

The ingredients are Wheat Flour, Palm oil (uh oh, that's not eco-friendly) sugar, glucose syrup, salt, and sodium bicarbonate. These are mixed into digestive style biscuits and compressed into blocks. They have been heat-treated but don't appear to have been baked. Following high temperature and high-pressure sterilization, they are suitable for long-term storage and transportation, The biscuits are tightly plastic wrapped and outer-layer foil bagged plastic bag packaging  creating a package  both hygienic and convenient, suitable for military and civilian use.

Each foil sachet holds four individually wrapped biscuit each pressed into two distinct portions easily  cracked to share or for ease of eating or sharing.  The vital statistics are listed as follows:

The  unopened sachets are 8cm (~3") square and 3cm (~1") thick.




Per 100g
/NRV%
Energy
1988kJ
24%
Protein
7.1g
12%
Fat
19.4g
32%
Carbohydrate
67.6g
23%
Sodium
238mg
12%
Given that each sachet is 200g and has four biscuits, each 50g portion has half these values. So two whole sachets gives you 100% of the daily recommend intake and most of the daily protein and carbs. That's not bad for 400g of dry biscuit. Obviously you'd want water to go with it and I found they go very well with a nice cup of tea.

The compressed biscuits are non-moisture absorbent, soft, and easy to break up and eat. but not mushy or crumbly. They are a high energy,  rich source of nutrition, making them anti-fatigue, and promote the rapid recovery of physical strength. They are dense with a tight texture which leads to you being more likely to feel full after eating.


Although they are made of same flour used to make wholemeal cookies, but because the high quality of the  material used which is more closely refined, the use of the anti-orangutan palm oil softener to lower its moisture content, and not easy bibulous (moisture absorbing) which means even minor punctures to the protective covers will not be too much of a concern , make cookies in the active ingredients can supplement physical strength (ingredients) under the same volume content more, so to make it more resistant to hungry. A long-lasting, sustaining Digestive Biscuit.

The foil sachets are small and sturdy enough to be put in a pocket, or stuffed into the bottom of a bug-out bag. They also fit four into a Platatac FUP dual magazine pouch.  That's 800g of nutrition ready to carry your adventure on over hill and dale for a bit longer.

The biscuits are tasty and wholesome, my kids liked them and even put smiles on our faces after some arduous crafting on the couch.

They're tastier than the Mainstay rations and have a much nicer mouthfeel. Apart from the palm oil I have no qualms recommending these as survival rations and suspect  they will  become a hiking and camping loadout staple for us.




BREAKING NEWS: Jason tells me he will be getting in a new order including the pork jerky flavour through the Blade and Stone site. If your dietary restrictions allow you should check it out!

Friday, August 26, 2016

Review: MRE review 1/2 day's rations


I had the opportunity to take a pile of Australian issue MRE components to work to test out, following on from a small selection of them falling in my lap from more than one undisclosed source. I will not be on-selling these, they're for my own entertainment and preparedness.

I wanted to give myself a good trial, so selected a full menu to replace what I would normally eat during the day at work. It is common to see "8,700kJ" as the average recommended intake and I have breakfast, lunch and two breaks at work, so I selected accordingly.


For breakfast I had a brown of muesli/porridge, which I mad with boiling water and a sachet of instant creamer. It made a solid, heavy and hearty porridge, which was flavoursome and had enough variety of ingredients to have a good and palatable consistency.










I had the "blueberry and apple" cereal bar for my mid-morning snack, it was again, dense and for all intents and purposes, could have come out of any kids

Interestingly when I looked up the nutritional content of current US issued MRE kits, they suggested that service-members (who were classified as highly active men between the ages of 18 and 30) typically use about 4,200 Calories a day. The conversion is  1 kJ = 0.2 Calories (Cals)or 1 Calorie = 4.2 kJ, giving a figure of 17,640 kJ a little over double the "average adult intake diet". Bear that in mind later.

Lunch was a bit more involved; a sachet of freeze-dried rice, beef and onion stew, a can of "diced two-fruits in syrup" with a sachet of tropical flavour Thorzt sports drink powder to drink.

The dehydrated rice was reconstituted with a canteen cup's worth of boiling water, and once ready, I simply upended it into a bowl, and added the cold stew to it. I could have tried reheating the stew, either by suspending its retort in a bowl of boiling water, or throwing it all in the microwave, but this would totally have been cheating.
It was a pretty decent meal, there were enough chunky bits of meat and onion to make it more than just thick gravy, but it was hardly a hefty chew. The stew itself was quite palatable cold, but a quick mix with the hot rice made it all the better.

Obviously you have to reconstitute the rice to make it in any way enjoyable, but it will reconstitute in cold water, if you don't have a source of heat, or are under restrictions.



I finished off my lunch with the can of fruit in syrup, which I popped open with my trusty EDC P-38 opener, and tucked into the just-as-off-the-shelf canned fruit. Nothing special to report there though.












For my afternoon break and to snack on in e afternoon, I had selected the chocolate drink, infamous canned cheese and even more infamous chocolate ration. Again, boiling water into the chocolate drink, which made a quite passable hot chocolate.

If I had wanted it to be extra creamy, I could have saved the instant creamer from breakfast and added it, but I think it didn't need it.





The Bega canned cheese, reported to me as a legendary constipation cause, appeared to be exactly the Kraft cheese stick cheese, in a can. It was firm but elastic, and "split" rather than crumbled. It was tasty enough, and reminded me of school-yard snack breaks for sure.

Lastly was the equally infamous legendarily laxative chocolate ration.  I don't actually enjoy milk chocolate, but I wanted the full experience, and even with all the food I'd included in my half-day's ration, I wanted to make a real showing of it.
I snacked on it throughout the afternoon and finished it just before going home, and suffered no ill effects.

Perhaps the cheese and chocolate battled each other into a stalemate, but I was the victor.

Adding up the constituents, I had had 8907kJ (2129Calories) in this selection, and this was just my daytime food.

All this, and I was pretty full, and certainly didn't feel that I had gone without. If anything, I felt I had wanted to eat the cheese or the chocolate, but not both.

It's also worth noting that this only made up a small portion of the full ADF ration-pack. Given that, and the full kJ load in that full pack, you could make one of these stretch a long way, or spread them out between a number of people to make a survival situation both more palatable, but also more secure.

If you can lay your hands on an MRE, you'd have to go a long way to find a better, more densely packed, supplied and readily consumable source of nutrition and energy than the ADF ration-pack. If you're in a position to lay hands on one, do it.

If you're in a field where you might be able to swap out, try swapping for an ADF rat-pack, you won't be disappointed.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Sneak-Peek: ADF ration pack H

Behold the full contents of an ADF Ration pack, menu "H".

I had the good fortune to have some of these fall into my grabby hands, and I wanted to show off the contents.

This represents an entire days consumables for an Australian infantryman.
 
 


 
Bundled in a heavy plastic cover (broken, for legitimacy's sake).

Snacks, three meals, drinks, tea and coffee, a FRED eating tool, spoon, matches, wipes, Vegemite, all a fighting body needs. 

Stay tuned and I'll cover what a meal is like in more detail.


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