I made it in an insulated food flask and needed 240ml of water. I added 240 straight away after yesterday’s trial with the Thai and it was the perfect consistency.
The smell was as I’d expect when I opened the sachet and the texture once prepared was better than before although the textured pea protein which was mince was definitely more chewy than the bigger pillowy pieces in the Thai. I would have preferred it a little less chewy. It reminded me of a product called Beanfeast made by bachelor’s back in the day, although they stopped making that when they started to use GM soya in the recipe and noone bought it.
I guess Beanfeast was actually a forerunner to Huel hot meals as it was convenient to make from a sachet although not nutritionally complete.
Anyway I left it for another 10 minutes in my flask and it was still quite chewy and the consistency remained good. Taste wise it had a good amount of heat but not quite enough depth of flavour, I’ll probably add some tomato puree and garlic powder and black pepper in future.
Definitely an improvement on the old version but not quite as good as the Thai.
Hope @David approves of my photo. I can guess what his focus is normally on.
I can tell you that behind these changes are methodical thinking and lots of information and data to back it up.
We understand that this was going to be a problem for people so we do advise that if a bigger portion is something you are looking to achieve you can use a pack and a half but just make sure that you sealed the pouch back up.
Those pieces are Textured Pea and Faba Bean Protein pieces, I assume from your comment that you are not a fan of these pieces?
Right. Today we have madras. Again big pillowy pieces of protein and plenty of rice.
240ml of boiling water into my insulated food pot to match previous 2 days but this was not enough. Indeed there did appear to be quite a lot of powder in this one which needed quite a bit of stirring to mix properly and then I added another 20ml of water. I’ve no idea if anyone makes it successfully with 200ml but that would have been far too stodgy. I could probably have added even more water to get the consistency of yesterday’s mexican but 260ml was pretty good. I used expensive coffee scales that are very accurate, so the water levels are right. To be fair, I have been using Huel for so long I normally just eyeball the liquid amounts now for powder, greens and hot and savoury, but for an accurate review I went down the measuring road.
Smells good on opening the sachet and even better when finished cooking and has a good depth of flavour. I expected this one to be my least favourite of the 3 grain revisions but it was the best one. It could possibly have done with a small amount of salt (and I never add salt to any food apart from chips).
So in order of preference it is:
1 Madras
2 Thai
3 Mexican
In the old meal packs it was
1 Thai
2 Mexican
3 Madras
However all of these revisions are improvements to the original and I’ll be buying them regularly. Haven’t actually bought grain based ones for a while (probably since the pasta ones first came out), apart from Thai which i did buy more recently, as overall preferred the pasta ones, but now will have more choice.
It does give me a question though. The new packs are supposed to be adequately mixed to give a good all round meal as opposed to a random 100mg couple of scoops out of a 7 meal bag, but there is no way I could eat any of them with just 200ml of water as they would be too thick. And also I thought the Mexican was a little underwhelming in its flavour profile, so is every single serve sachet pretty consistent?
So each portion is the perfect ratio, I suppose, how stodgy you want it is completely down to personal preference, but it should be cooked through with the recommended amount of water. I know some people who like a soupy-like feel, so do add more water so again it comes down to what you like really.
As for cooking time, I think it’s so hit and miss. I’ve had some people say it works perfectly the time recommended, and some people say it needs a little bit longer. I don’t know, again, is it down to Kettle temperatures or the method it’s cooked in (Pot, bowl, etc).
Interesting, complete switcharoo!
This is good to hear, glad you can get a little more variety!
So as I said above, these have been designed to give you a perfect portion. Many complaints came from people not getting the perfect balance of powder and other ingredients, leading to poor taste, poor texture and overall more complaints. The revision into pouches fixes this issue!
That’s unfortunate - it looks like they are using those horrid protein chunks from the pots. I found the texture of these enough for me to never think of reordering a pot.
If that’s the same protein that’s used with all the others (judging by the mushroom one it is) they that’s a hard pass for any more hot huel products from me.
