It all started with a cast iron skillet and a dedication to high-quality food, regardless of how many miles Shannon Waters found herself from the trailhead.
A backcountry seeker and professional chef, Waters found herself lugging heavy cooking equipment on trips because of her dedication to culinary pursuits.
At the time, backpacking meals on the market didn’t meet Waters’ standards for “good food,” so she decided to make some herself. This became the birth of Gastro Gnome Meals, which launched out of Bozeman in 2020.
“I want an amazing dining experience in the middle of nowhere,” Waters said. ”I was obsessed with having the best meal possible wherever I went.”
So Waters’ bought a dehydrator and tried her hand at converting her green curry recipe into a shelf stable meal.
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Her first foray turned out to be a success.
“I ate the first bite and was like ... I'm better at this than anybody else out there. I'm going to have to do this now,” Waters said.
The company offers the same green curry to this day.
The name Gastro Gnome Meals comes from the term gastronome, which refers to a person devoted to high-quality food and drink.
“My background was as a fine dining chef, and I was still working in the industry, opening restaurants for other people,” Waters said. “And my whole world was like farm to table. So I just couldn't accept that the food that was available for me to eat in the woods was all sorts of chemicals and stabilizers and nothing that I could recognize as food.”
Waters’ professional training comes from The French Culinary Institute in New York City. From there she went on to hold positions at restaurants around the country, gaining skills and techniques from renowned chefs. She’s also taught culinary and hospitality courses at Montana State University and Gallatin College.
“What I hoped to do was make a meal that was as good in my home as it was in the backcountry, and that there would be no sacrifice,” Waters said. “So you could still have a great adventure and a great meal.”
The process
In order to make meals nonperishable for backcountry consumption they must be dehydrated using a process called freeze drying. Basically, the frozen food is put in a vacuum and through sublimation the water is removed from the food.
The biggest hurdle for Waters was working out how her recipes would stand up to the process of freeze drying and still rehydrate the way she intended.
“You don’t know what it’s going to taste like until it comes out of the freeze dryer,” she said.
For example, in the process of creating the biscuits and gravy meal, Waters worked through 40 different biscuit recipes experimenting with ingredients to find the perfect biscuit that rehydrates properly.
Along the way, Waters found there are some meals that just don’t work in the freeze-drying process, like gnocchi.
“Basically these little potato dumplings turn into golf balls, and you can never rehydrate them," she said. "You could crack your teeth on them. I tried really hard to make them, and I learned there's some things that I’ll never understand about what goes on in there.”
What's on the menu?
Gastro Gnome offers three breakfasts, six lunches and dinners, two desserts, two trail mixes and instant coffee.
Prices for the products start at $7 for the huckleberry ice cream sandwich and top out at $17.25 for one serving of meals like the mushroom ragu farfalle. The meals can only be purchased online or at the Bozeman storefront.
The menu is inspired by Waters’ favorite comfort foods from around the world.
“I just kind of thought, what do I want to eat if I’m really cold?” Waters said. “What do I want to eat if I'm really hot? What do I want to eat if I'm really exhausted? So I came up with some comfort food recipes that I know and love and hope that other people would too.”
Waters said she tries to meet peoples’ palates where they are and wants to give people with dietary restrictions options. So the menu offerings include everything from vegan to gluten-free and Indian braised yogurt chicken to Italian fennel sausage rigatoni.
“We have like a super light and bright oat bowl that's vegan. And then we have kind of the exact opposite, which is a biscuits and gravy that's like really heavy, really hardy, a wonderful way to start a really cold morning.”
The third breakfast offering is a bison hash with a tomatillo salsa.
“It’s really important to us to know where the meat comes from, especially as a hunter myself,” Waters said. “I don’t like to grocery shop for meat, and if I'm doing that in my own home, I want to be able to know the rancher here at Gastro Gnome.”
Everything but the chicken comes from Montana producers.
"I'm not going to apply a totally different ethos with food that I serve others in the food that I take with me to go acquire my own meat," Waters said. "That doesn't make any sense. The ingredients matter to us, the farmers and ranchers, they matter to us."
According to Waters there’s always more to come. At the moment they are playing around with a cheesy pizza pasta, which is geared toward “younger adventurers like the teens that are going out hunting with their parents that still need fuel and want a flavor profile that speaks more to their appetite.”
For a full list of Gastro Gnome meals and desserts visit their website at gastrognomemeals.com.
Conservation and community
As a backpacking meal company, Waters believes it's imperative to give back, which is why the company is 2% for conservation certified, meaning 2% of all sales are donated back to various conservation- and community-oriented organizations.
"I bet if you polled all of our customers and asked, 'Where do you go?' They'd say public lands," Waters said. "So if the product I'm making is sending people out into public lands, and I'm not personally doing something about conserving that, like, where's this going? We have to do something about it. So it's not a lot but it's what we can do to make sure that we have a business, or at least giving toward conserving those places."
One group the company partners with is the Mountaineering Association by offering discounts to members of the group's Junior Mountaineering Team. The team develops skills for youth in the mountains by teaching ropes, knots and climbing techniques.
Another group the company supports is the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation by providing their volunteers and crews an affordable meal program to keep "these folks fed on those long tough days in the mountains. A good meal made better by hard work and an incredible view."
"We keep all of our conservation efforts within state lines," Waters said. "We'd love to support every organization that is helping with conservation efforts across the country, but our efforts are really focused on Montana."
When asked what meals she always throws in her pack on a hunting trip, Waters had a quick response:
"I will almost always grab the biscuits and gravy and peach cobbler. I end up eating the peach cobbler any time of day, so it's really become my glassing meal. When I am sitting there, and I am so bored and can’t look at another rock, I rehydrate a peach cobbler, and I'm happy again.”
Thom Bridge is a photojournalist with the Independent Record and Montana State News Bureau. He also hosts the Montana Untamed podcast.