One of my favourite mountain foods for the hills is shortbread. Excellent mix of sugar and carbs, and quite moreish when I’m feeling it. Readily available and cheap.
Thought I’d seen it all… but £18 for 160g of tourist shortbread in London. That’s £112 a kilo 
!!!
Shortly after arriving in ZL from EI I called into a hut for smoko and was delighted to find a slab of Kendall Mint Cake in a ziplock bag on the table.
Sadly the experience was somewhat spoiled when it turned out to be firelighters.
Wow
£3.95 from Walker’s own website
Unfortunately banned for me due to the saturated fat content 
Rick
Yeah, not healthy at all - one of the reasons it’s mountains only food for me.
Probably no more healthy for you than @ZL4NVW ‘s Kendal mint cake
Dunno about ‘top’ food but the healthy option works for me.
I usually activate single summits and do them late morning to mid-afternoon. So, I’ll eat half my lunch on the drive there and half when I get back to the car. I really appreciate the latter after a long tiring walk. For when I feel my blood sugar is a bit low during a tough ascent or when getting cold sitting around on a wintry summit, I find a few dried figs or an apple, banana or pear peps me up. When I’m getting hot and sweaty the high fructose of a satsuma makes me feel better.
I used to carry some chocolate for ‘emergencies’. That’s a laugh, I would always eat it.
I reckon the firelighters would taste better.
I can assure you they didn’t taste better. Staying power though - that is something firelighters have.
Gearbox oil, also. Just in case you were thinking of trying it. Petrol shifts it ok, so you’d think whisky would be an effective solvent, but apparently not.
Budget brand ‘muesli’ bars are about the only effective emergency energy food. They taste so awful that the only time you’d eat them it’d have to be an emergency.
Chocolate, on the other hand …
One of those words from the upside-down lands that makes you realise just how massive the differences really are between ZL, VK and UK. But at least you still spell the words correctly.
c.f. arvo, servo
I’ll swap you my Pancreas then you’ll understand how much aerobic exercise is needed so you can eat 100gm of chocolate. But oh does it taste good.
At those prices you’d be better with a wee baggie of Bolivian Marching Candy. Cheaper and works faster. Sadly it’s also very moreish according to user comments!
Seriously, I’d not considered shortbread as a mountain food.
When I started as a hill walker in my teens Kendal mint cake was the universally recommended energy food: at first I thought it was delicious but in time I got tired of it and eventually came to hate it! Mars bars made an acceptable substitute but eventually I found that the quickest acting energy boost was a packet of glucose tablets. Now if it comes to food rather than an energy booster, I find it hard to beat a cheese and beetroot or a mashed pilchard butty. Dammit, this thread is giving me an appetite!
They turn into rock at sub zero temperatures, just when jaw muscles have forgotten how to work properly!
A Bounty bar (chocolate / glucose /coconut) is my choice…
That’s what the Swiss army penknife is for! A leisurely five minutes carving the mars bar into thin slices and sucking them to softness is something to treasure!
When I did my Winter ML course at Glenmore Lodge we used a frozen mars bar slotted into a transverse slot in the hardened snow and tied a rope to it. Our group of around six people pulling on the rope could not dislodge or pull the mars bar out of the slot…
I have dipped a frozen Mars bar into my cup of tea in the past. In the days when I used to carry a flash of tea or coffee with me. I’m not sure I’ll get rid of the image of Brian sucking slices of Mars bar out of my mind. If I have nightmares tonight it will be your fault Brian.
We used to stop at the chippy in Callander on way to and from the winter hills when I was a student. Always amazed that that deep fried mars bars was advertised, a selling point for the chippy.
I remember being a sensible lad on an early visit, ordering a pizza and getting the deep fried shock of my life when it arrived.
A pizza warm in the fat frier is known as a scrunchy.
A Soreen malt loaf is roughly 1000 Kcal, with a good mix of carbs, complex carbs, fibre and protein. A whole one is sufficient nourishment for a big day out.
It’s best thought of as fuel rather than food.
Has to have butter though to grease its passage!
Back in the day, my pal and I experimented with slicing, buttering, jamming and even cheesing. We eventually worked out that opening the end of the packet and just knawing a bit off was the simplest approach. It tastes the same even if it has been squished inside a rucksack or pocket. Doesn’t seem to freeze either.
I always used to pack Double Deckers. There’s so much chewing in them that there was a subliminal impression that I’d eaten sonewhat more than I’d actually carried, and obviously it provided the sugar kick too.
