Must-Try Korean-Inspired Camping Meals for Your Next Trip

The Korean peninsula lays claim to one of the great global cuisines, one that commonly features bold flavors and meals exquisitely marrying the delicious and the nutritious. Indeed, extensive use of both fresh and fermented vegetables (among other characteristics) makes many Korean dishes wonderfully healthy, even as they deliver sumptuous hits of spiciness, sweetness, and umami.

Incorporating some Korean and Korean-inspired flavors and preparations into your camp-cuisine toolkit is a great way to add some real variety—and, often enough, boost the nutrition of your camping or backpacking meal plan. And here at Mountain House, we’ve made it super-simple to do so thanks to our brand-new Korean-Inspired Beef With Rice & Vegetables, one of several exciting products (along with takes on pizza and enchiladas) we’re absolutely stoked to be debuting.

In this article, we’ll present a number of different options for Korean camping food and introduce our Korean-Inspired Beef—a pouch we can’t wait for you to try!

Why Korean Food is Perfect for Camping Trips

Defined as much by their side dishes as by their main course, many Korean meals are easy to whip up in a single pan or pot and designed to be eaten as a mixed-together medley—aspects that certainly lend themselves to campsite cooking.

Many of the staple ingredients, from rice and grilled meat to condiments like soy sauce, gochujang (fermented red chile paste), and the incredibly nutritious and sharp-flavored kimchi (seasoned, salted, and fermented vegetables, often cabbage), are easy to pack and manage while camping.

And Korean camping meals are all the easier to pull together if, for example, you bring along precooked rice and premarinated meat as well as sealed containers of sauces and seasonings.

10 Korean-Inspired Camping Food Ideas

What follows are 10 awesome Korean camping food ideas, including our brand-new pouch—another great resource to go along with such existing Mountain House guides as “Easy & Tasty Camping Foods Anyone Can Make” and “49 Quick & Tasty Camping Food Ideas.”

1. Korean-Inspired Beef by Mountain House

The Mountain House Korean-Inspired Beef With Rice & Vegetables is our freeze-dried spin on an über-popular Korean dish: beef bulgogi. Anchored by sumptuously tender cuts of beef and fluffy basmati rice, the pouch also incorporates healthy veggies such as sweet carrots, red peppers, and zucchini, along with a classic blend of spices and seasonings including ginger, garlic, soy sauce, and a finishing touch of toasted black sesame seeds.

We’ll go into greater detail on this fabulous new product—including some insights into how we developed it—a bit later in the article. So consider this just a sample!

2. Campfire Bulgogi (Korean BBQ Beef)

Bulgogi typically involves a marinated cut of meat—beef, most iconically—which is grilled or pan-fried. Besides our Korean-Inspired Beef pouch, another way to pull off a campsite version is by using pre-marinated sliced beef and cooking it up on a griddle or skillet. You can go the traditional route and serve it with precooked rice or even wrap it up in a tortilla for a sort of Korean-Mexican fusion dish.

Our pouch certainly makes this dish even easier, with no prep or clean-up needed. Just add hot water, wait, and enjoy!

3. Kimchi Fried Rice (Kimchi Bokkeumbap)

Another of the best Korean recipes for camping, Kimchi Fried Rice is a supremely versatile dish that’s big-time crowd-pleasing at the campsite. Stir-fry rice (ideally precooked) and kimchi together and garnish with scallions. Spam or mozzarella cheese are common accoutrements, and both are ideal for cranking up the heartiness factor. To inject more protein, you can also consider cracking an egg into the rice/kimchi stir-fry, topping it with a fried egg, or cutting up a hard-boiled egg to add to the dish.

(Kimchi Bokkeumbap, by the way, is an excellent way to use leftover rice, which for many is the preferred form to use.)

4. Kimbap (Korean Rice Rolls)

Portable and pre-makeable, a camping-friendly spin on kimbap (Korean rice rolls) is a great idea for lunches along the trail. This sushi-like dish traditionally has rice, veggies, and sometimes seafood or meat rolled up into a seaweed wrapper. You can fill your rolls with whatever your heart desires—veggies, eggs, pickled radish, tuna, etc.—and use wax paper for easy wrapping and transport. Just make sure you have enough cooler space to store them!

5. Budae Jjigae (Army Stew)

Budae Jjigae, aka Army Stew or Army Base Stew, is a hot-pot dish tracing its origins to the Korean War, when U.S. military rations became incorporated into Korean cuisine. It’s a spicy stew that can be made with ramen noodles (including instant ramen), kimchi, gochujang, spam, tofu, sliced mushrooms, and other easy ingredients.

This one-pot-wonder is ideal for camping because it can be made in a Dutch oven or a large cookpan or pot over a campfire. Most of the work for this dish is in prepping the ingredients; the cooking process is more of a letting-it-bubble-along sort of deal. (Stock is preferable, but you can make do with plain water.)

That kind of preparation also makes Budae Jjigae great for group camping, as you’ll end up with a rich, flavorful stew ready to satisfy a lot of hungry mouths.

6. Korean Pork Belly Lettuce Wraps (Samgyeopsal)

Want a quick shot of gastronomic bliss? Wrap some grilled slices of pork belly in crisp lettuce and dip into the spicy BBQ sauce called ssamjang, then enjoy immediately. Korean Pork Belly Lettuce Wraps are easily made at the campsite: Just cook the meat in a cast-iron pan or flat grill, then add it to a handheld wrapper of fresh lettuce. Throw in some chopped-up scallions and sautéed or fire-roasted garlic inside to level this up even more.

Photo by BRALRO on Unsplash

The seasoned sauce of ssamjang, meanwhile, made from fermented soybean paste and gochujang, can be bought pre-made or whipped up at home. You can dunk these Pork Belly Lettuce Wraps into whatever dipping sauce you prefer and/or is easiest to come by.

7. Soy Sauce Braised Eggs (Mayak Gyeran)

After a first taste, many become downright obsessive about the scrumptious soy-sauce-marinated eggs called Mayak Gyeran. They’re also another example of simple Korean camping food ideas on account of their ability to be made ahead of time and stored for several days in a cooler or RV fridge. The key is the marinade: soy sauce spiked with any number of garnishes, from garlic and scallions to chili flakes and sesame seeds, into which you immerse cooked soft-boiled eggs for at least a couple of hours.

Serve the marinated eggs with rice for a quick, energy-boosting—oh, and insanely tasty—breakfast or lunch.

8. Spicy Tteokbokki (Rice Cakes in Gochujang Sauce)

A beloved Korean street food, spicy tteokbokki refers to rice cakes simmered in gochujang sauce. For a camp-friendly version, boil rice cakes (tteok) along with fish cakes, onion, and premade gochujang sauce in a small pot or pan over a portable burner.

9. Bibimbap in a Bowl

The much-loved Korean rice dish called bibimbap is one of those meals that might as well be the dictionary entry for “soul-satisfying.” And for camping, it’s another dish that can be basically all prepared ahead of time and just mixed together when you’re ready for a jolt of energy-rich deliciousness.

Bring precooked rice along with containers of side dishes (banchan) and seasonings such as gochujang, sesame oil, hard-boiled eggs, and sautéed veggies, then just stir everything together in one bowl. Bibimbap can be enjoyed hot or cold—all the more convenient.

10. Korean Street Toast (Gilgeori Toast)

Korean Street Toast makes a campsite breakfast for the ages. The possibilities in terms of ingredients are pretty endless, but here’s a simple version: Mix together sliced cabbage, carrot, and onions with an egg until everything’s well mixed and coated. Heat butter, margarine, or oil in a skillet, then add this egg mixture to make a fried veggie omelet of sorts, flipping as needed. Toast two slices of bread, then place the omelet on one of them, top with ketchup and sugar (if so desired), and slap the other slice on top to make a killer breakfast sandwich.

All About the Korean-Inspired Beef by Mountain House

We’re mighty pleased with how our Korean-Inspired Beef With Rice & Vegetables turned out. Like all of our meals, it’s the result of Mountain House’s Research & Development team’s exacting standards for flavor and texture, along with countless rounds of testing and fine-tuning to create something we’re proud to stand behind.

The magnificent medley of succulent beef, plush basmati rice, toothsome veggies, plus sweet, savory, and lightly heat-touched bulgogi sauce seems beautifully simple and perfectly balanced, as indeed it is. But it came about via lots of hard work.

As Mountain House R&D Director Drew Heubsch explains, the three key aspects to producing Korean bulgogi in freeze-dried form were the beef (achieving the best texture), the rice (making sure it rehydrates to the perfect consistency), and the seasoning (landing on a blend that avoids the artificial-tasting, often overly sweet flavor many of our competitors offer in sauces).

“Like everything we do,” Drew says, “we start from scratch, and we develop the flavor profiles.” Doing so means close consultation with suppliers as well as spicehouses, chefs, and other experts to refine that flavor profile, drawing from the best ingredients and trial-and-error methodologies to make sure we’re doing justice to those ingredients and to the culinary heritage of the dish.

At Mountain House, we’re cooking everything in the kitchen ahead of the freeze-drying chamber. We spend a lot of time fine-tuning our prepwork and cooking techniques beyond the careful fiddling with time, temperature, and the like in the freeze-drying process itself.

As Drew puts it, it’s something of a blend of art and science, and a process we’ve been honing for more than a half-century here at Mountain House.

The ability to dig into Korean-inspired beef bulgogi at the campsite by just adding water to the pouch and waiting a mere 15 minutes feels like magic (magic, again, conjured by the long hours and meticulous research our team puts in). The end result is a gluten-free, filling, nutrient-dense, and mouthwateringly good meal. And, of course, our Korean-Inspired Beef boasts the same industry-leading shelf life for which Mountain House is famous, making it perfect for camping, backpacking, and emergency-prepping purposes!

Bring Bold Flavors Into the Campsite With Mountain House

Flavorful, fun, and easy to make outdoors, many Korean meals can be easily converted into camping-friendly form, whipped up or heated over campfires, griddles, and backpacking stoves alike.

And there’s no more convenient version than our Korean-Inspired Beef, a fantastic new addition (along with our Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl and Cheesy Beef Enchilada Bowl) to the Mountain House inventory of delicious camping and backpacking fare. Enjoy!