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It's not poutine in a pouch, but it certainly looks interesting ....
Pizza prototypes that military researchers are testing for use in MREs are on display at the 2013 Association of the United States Army exposition in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 22, 2013.
C.J. Lin/Stars and Stripes
Stars & Stripes, 25 Oct 13Why aren’t there pizza MREs?
It’s a question troops have asked for as long as they’ve been eating Meals, Ready to Eat.
“Pizza is the holy grail of MREs because for decades, people have been asking for this,” said Paul DellaRocca, program integrator at the Defense Department’s Combat Feeding Directorate, which develops anything troops eat or cook with in the field. "If you give servicemembers a product that isn’t on the mark, he said, “they’re going to bite into it and not say, ‘This is pizza.’ That’s what we need them to say.”
The problem to this point has been that technology hasn’t been advanced enough to make sure the pizza actually tastes like pizza after three years in temperatures up to 80 degrees, according to military researchers. And how do you keep the sauce from soaking into the crust?
But now, researchers at the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center think they’ve figured it out by getting down to the molecular level of the sauce and trying different drying methods to preserve the pie.
“We’re looking at new shelf-stable bread formulations to form a crust that’s recognizable to what a soldier would expect a pizza to taste like,” DellaRocca said. “We have to look at formulations that maintain texture, flavor, appearance, odor, so that after three years, when they open it up, it’s going to have the same qualities as it did on Day 1.”
The pizza was unveiled to the public at this year’s annual Association of the United States Army exposition in Washington, although the government shutdown leading up to the event meant that no samples were produced in time for convention-goers to get a taste ....
C.J. Lin/Stars and Stripes