Montana Gourmet

Enjoy scrumptious, healthy and convenient ready-to-eat Montana Gourmet meals made with A Land of Grass natural, grass-fed Beef and Lamb, along with curated grass-fed beef and lamb from other Montana producers.

Try all four varieties —- Beef Creole Stew, Lamb & Vegetable Stew, Lamb & Vegetable Curry and Marinara Sauce with Beef. Each 16 ounce pouch serves two people. It can sit on your shelf for three years — but it won’t. You’ll love it.

These shelf-stable meals are great for camping and hunting — just toss them in the pack and heat them in a pot of water over the campfire. I’ve carried them in a pack saddle, bouncing down the trail in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The durable pouches withstand the harsh demands of trail life and make a quick meal at the end of a long day.

They are perfect for busy professionals, too.

The hard-to-buy-for person who already has everything will be delighted by a gift of Montana Gourmet Sample Pack.

Made with ingredients you can pronounce, these meals offer nutrition without preservatives or other additives. Each pouch is filled, sealed and cooked in a specialized pressure cooker so no preservatives are necessary. I like to eat real food, not weird stuff concocted in a chemistry lab, so I make real food. Montana Gourmet.

My crew makes every meal in a small kitchen in Conrad, on the prairie of north-central Montana. We appreciate the realities of rural life — the blue -sky days and starry nights, grizzlies that show up on the outskirts of town once in a while, the view all the way into Canada with only barbed wire to slow the wind, the mountains at our back door, the knowledge that our neighbors have our backs when we need them and we have theirs when they need us. This place is honest, with no bells and whistles. Every Montana Gourmet meal contains a little bit of that Montana prairie spirit.

The Mushy Vegetable Conundrum

The idea for Montana Gourmet began in about 2012 when my upright freezer door popped open and meat began to thaw. My brother-in-law, who lives in the Appalachians and knows everything, advised me to can that meat — “add some onions, garlic, salt and pepper, then pressure cook it,” he said. I pulled jars of delicious, fall-off-my-fork meat out of that pressure cooker and knew I needed to share this with the world.

I started to experiment with recipes. When I cooked the meat long enough to be safe and shelf-stable, the vegetables turned to mush. Yuck.

I searched for solutions to the Mushy Vegetable Conundrum for a long time — probably longer than any normal person would search. Finally, I came across a super-efficient Immersaflow retort pressure cooker. The Immersaflow retort keeps the meat safe, but heats and cools so quickly that the carrots and potatoes maintain a tasty texture. No more baby food in canned stews for this rancher!

I couldn’t find an Immersaflow in production anywhere in the United States so I bought one. Then I remodeled an old building into a USDA-certified kitchen and Montana Gourmet was launched.

Now you get to enjoy real food made the way Montana pioneers made it. Hearty. Healthy. Delicious.

I hope you enjoy these meals as much as I enjoy making them for you.