Menu 18: Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce

Crunchy. Doughy. Squishy. The Beef Ravioli satisfies the whole tactile spectrum.  With corn nuts, ravioli and bug juice, it is every 8-year-old’s dream MRE.  

The favorite son of Italian home cooking, brother of the tortellini, and distant cousin of the Jewish kreplach, Japanese gyoza, Chinese shumai, Polish pierogi, and Thai samosa, the ravioli is a stuffing of meat or cheese wrapped and sealed in egg pasta dough.

Toasted Corn Nugget – Eat

With a truly excellent crunch, perhaps the best offered by any item in any MRE, the toasted corn nuggets are this meal's shining gem.  Corn nuts are made by soaking dry corn in water for several days before deep-frying until brittle. These particular morsels are masterfully buttered, salted, and roasted, as if scraped from the bottom of the popcorn bin at your favorite local cinema.  The golden warmth of the toasting will leave you in disbelief that they are, in fact, served at room temperature.

Coffee, Instant Type III, Freeze dried – Don't drink.

You’d think that after previous failures with instant coffee Types I and II, they would have learned something about making coffee. Strike three! You’re out.

Fittingly, the freeze-drying process used to manufacture instant coffee is the result of American military research.  The coffee beans are roasted, ground, percolated, dehydrated, then apparently discarded and replaced in the packaging with dirt.   Instant coffee comprises over 75% of the coffee drank in homes of the British, a people known for their bland and uninspired food.

Dissolving the hamster-dropping-shaped kernals in hot water, I sipped a insipid liquid vaguely resembling diluted hot coco.  There really isn’t much else to it.

Creamer, Non-dairy, Powdered

Gives the drink the same flavor but in expanded globules.  Nothing more than white paint powder to bring the drink to its familiar color.

Splenda Packet

The ultimate reveal.  Splenda proves that anything can be palatable if only sweet enough. The result was a poor man’s version of the instant cappuccino powder; a sweet dessert drink incepting the vague memory of coffee cake.

Fun fact: despite its motto as the “no calorie sweetener” each 1 gram packet has, in fact, 3.36 calories.

Beef Ravioli – Eat if hungry

The heartiness of the tomato sauce somehow overpowers any flavor of beef fat present in the dish in considerable quantity.  Each ravioli is perfectly sized for the MRE pouch: not so big to require cutlery beyond the brown plastic spoon, but not so small that’s it is incapable of carrying sauce The doughy texture of the ravioli shells is quite pleasing in a jejune sort of way.  Think Chef Boyardee.

Wheat Snack Bread – Eat if hungry

Dusted in flour as if just rolled and baked, the wheat bread has a sweet flavor that is dry to the mouth. Its swirls of perforated dough enable easy separation into bread sticks and are a good vehicle for scooping the otherwise uninspired sauce of the ravioli.

Beverage Base Powder Tropical Punch - Don't drink

The prototypical “bug juice”.  The “Tropical” flavor is almost exclusively pineapple and cannot hold a candle to the Hawaiian Punch most commonly paired by discerning diners with canned ravioli entrees.  The flavor is sweet at the moment of first taste but dissipates immediately afterward. The powder is mostly food coloring, specifically Red 40: an azo dye manufactured from coal tar and banned completely in many European countries.

Raisins - Don't  Eat
These aren’t the Sun Maid raisins from your childhood.  Oh, no.  For one, these bad boys never stick together. Each is highly lubricated in glycerol and captex oil.  While the grease may ease their passage into the stomach and reduce the hazard for choking, it dampens the authenticity of the grape, giving it a preservative-like taste that varies piece by piece.  Mysteriously too, the skin on the raisins is quite loose as if each raisin lost a lot of weight dehydrating in the packaging.

Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce

Taste - **

Rarity - ***

Presentation - ***

Bonus items - **