Released in spring of 2025, the Mountain House Cheesy Beef Enchilada Bowl is a backpacking meal that offers another form of Mexican food for dinner while backpacking, in addition to the excellent Adobo Rice & Chicken meal that Mountain House released a few years prior (our review).

The new Mountain House Cheesy Beef Enchilada meal boasts 660 calories (on the high side for Mountain House pouches) and is suitable for a gluten free diet. The meal is based around beef, corn tortillas (an interesting ingredient in a freeze-dried meal), cheese, an enchilada sauce, rice, black beans, and corn. This meal requires 1.5 cups of boiling water and a longer (for Mountain House meals) 15 minutes of rehydration time. Once the meal has rehydrated, you’re looking at a rather soupy, rather monotone consistency. However, this is a meal that despite first impressions really brings the flavor.

Meal Impressions

Upon diving into the meal, at least taste wise, you do really get the fully enchilada experience here. Spicy at first but tolerable by most palates, and with a smoky note dominating throughout the course of the meal, Mountain House has really brought the enchilada flavor to this meal – in fact flavor wise it’s a perfect match. And in case you haven’t inferred by now, as long as you like enchiladas the flavor is very good, great in fact.

That said, a few things do seem to keep this meal from achieving perfection. Consistency wise it seems as though some improvement could be made – while the meal does firm up a bit the end consistency is more like a hearty dip, and to be honest if you had a bag of corn chips and a pouch or two of this meal you might even be able to throw a party.

Additionally, it surprised me that while beef is the first ingredient, it’s not all that detectable. I feel that larger chunks of beef may have been a good addition here. The corn tortilla flavor is there as the second ingredient, but again any texture isn’t assertive. Aside from providing a separate bag of tortillas strips or chips inside the pouch to finish the meal with however, it is hard to imagine what else Mountain House could have done here.

Rice is present in the meal and it was appreciated that it’s not the number one ingredient, as many backpacking dinner meals can turn into a nightly monotonous routine of rice, with…you name it. Perhaps extra black beans and / or corn (present in this meal but in smaller quantities) may have also helped with texture. Lastly, for a cheesy enchilada the cheese is noticeable, but it’s hard to have too much cheese for a cheesy enchilada meal. Overall it’s hard to complain with this meal however.

Conclusion

In the future, I think I’ll probably add some additional cheese and finish with some corn chips to add some crunch when it comes to this meal and call it good. The base is certainly there and overall, this meal has one of the best flavor profiles in the Mountain House lineup that will likely be a welcome addition to my food bag on upcoming trips as long as the meal is offered.

You can find the new Mountain House Cheesy Beef Enchilada meal here at Amazon.com as well as here at Mountain House.

Editor's Note: This meal review originally appeared in Issue 58 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here.