Dehydrating Ground Beef - Making Gravel

in this video I'm going to take this one pound of extra lean ground beef and dehydrate it so it's something I can add to trail meals at a later date if you're interested keep watching sometime ago I released a video on preparing budget trail meals and that video dealt with how to put together common materials into a packages that you could then use erode on the trail for preparing lunches and the like a lot of those materials were dehydrated vegetables and other ingredients things that you can purchase locally one comment that I had quite often on that video was how did I prepare my dehydrated meats so that's what I thought with I would do with this video is show you what the process I go through for making what's commonly known as gravel that's because what it looks like when it's finished but actually it's just dehydrated lean ground beef all right before we get too far into the process of how I cook and dehydrate my ground beef I just want to talk about the ingredients and shelf life for a few minutes so I always use extra lean ground beef now for this video I bought it just a one package portion but most of the time I'm keeping my eyes open to for when it goes on sale so if I can get alerted to tray of extra lean ground beef on sale I'll bring it home divide it up into smaller portions and freeze those and then when I'm ready to turn it into the dehydrator ground beef I'll defrost it cook it dehydrate it and then I can ready to package it away so if you can get it on sale you've much better off you can get away with using lean or even a medium ground beef the problem is residual fat so any fat left in the meat after it's cooked is going to affect shelf-life it won't be too long if there's a lot of fat in it it won't be too long before it goes rancid and you'll know when you open it up because it's gonna smell bad so if you can get extra lean ground beef better off and even with that I'm going to show you how to remove any fat that may be left over during the process so let's just talk about shelf-life for a few minutes probably the most common question I get when it comes to making dehydrated ground beef is how long will it last well I'll tell you for me personally I have extra lean ground beef that was rehydrated very dry vacuum sealed and kept in my freezer and when I open it up in well in excess of a year later it was still good I'm not going to suggest that you do the same but I will tell you is that there are a few factors that affect it that all you can use to make it last longer so begin with extra lean ground beef dry it as much as you possibly can at a reasonably high temperature vacuum seal put it in the freezer that's how you're going to get your longest shelf life how long will it last well different authorities had different recommendations I've seen between six months and two years so I go with a year if it's kept that way and I haven't had any go bad on me yet if you don't vacuum sealant you don't freeze it you just keep it in a in an airtight container like a ziploc bag expect a three or four months so if your that's the way you're going to keep your dry beef then you're better off making it shortly before you use it when you go on the trails so those are some good factors now there's some downsides to making extra dry lean ground beef one is it's harder to rehydrate the drier it is the longer it takes to rehydrate now that's not a problem if you're simmering you can put it in before you put in the rest of your vegetables and give it a little time to rehydrate and regain some water in it and it will be okay you can leave a little bit of fat in it if you want to it will then rehydrate a little quicker it'll also taste a little bit better the problem is of course shorter shelf life so that's up to you I prefer to make it as dry as possible I'll make sure that I just have a little extra simmer time for before I have my vegetables and that way I'm sure that the meat not going bad okay let's get started with the process of preparing our meat for dehydration so for this video I've decided to do two things I'm going to take half of my pound of meat and I'm going to dehydrate it or prepare it the same way I normally would and for the other half this half I'm going to try something I have not tried before which is to add breadcrumbs so I have some bread comes here that I'm just going to literally going to mix in probably but I have hand my hands all nice and greasy but the purpose of that in the breadcrumbs so I understand is that it will help the meat rehydrate much better when you go to cook it so it should be much more palatable not so gravely now I also understand that when you do add the breadcrumbs to it what it's doing is it's actually holding on to some of the fat so once again you're gonna have some fat left over in your gravel your dehydrated ground beef when you're finished so that's going to shorten the shelf life some so you just have to be aware of that that and I'll remember of course was I'm going to market on the bags that I put it in that this will not have the same shelf life that this one will which will be extra lean by the time I'm finished in the process so what I'm going to do is mix this up by hand and we'll be cooking that one but first I'm just going to cook the regular extra lean with no additives so good time to point out that you don't add any spices any salts anything else to this I mean I suppose you can but that's going to impact the end flavor so most people myself included like to leave this as plain as possible so that you can adjust the taste of your meal on the end where you prepare it you don't want to be pre determining that it's going to be spicy salty or whatever at this point so my recommendation is just to leave it as plain as possible add your spices when you're cooking up the later in the field okay so I'm gonna mix this up and have that set aside and in the meantime I'm going to start this frying and I'll show you what that looks like in the frying pan right here's my half pound of extra lean ground beef fry pan is hot and I'm just going to start to break it up so break it up as much as you possibly can the smaller and the more consistent the sizes of ground beef are the better it is for dehydrating because it'll be more evenly dehydrated and the better it is for rehydrating at a letter point so this does take a little bit of time I'm not going to make you watch and go through the whole Pro this so I'll just show you miss starting out here and then I'll show you what the finished project looks like for the finished cooked meat looks like before we go to the next step okay her ground beef is ready I'm very impressed very little fat I can still see a little bit of oil in the bottom of the frypan but it seems to have been really really nice lean ground beef that I was able to purchase my beef is all thoroughly cooked broken down as small as I can reasonably get it by just constantly pushing that ground the pieces apart like this I have a little bit of browning on the meat which is nice it does that to the favor a little bit so the next step from here is to take it over to the sink where I have a metal colander ready to put the meat in because even though it doesn't look like there's any fat in here there is and we're going to try and wash off any extra fat that we can hi folks well this is a little embarrassing it turns out when I was editing this video that I discovered that I had failed to hit the record button for the segment where I was rinsing the ground beef off in my sink so be quite honest it was a simple process I literally took this stainless steel colander put it in my sink put the ground beef from the fry pan right in that and then just ran hot water the hottest water that I had running out of the tap I didn't have to use boiling water I also used the spray attachment and just made sure that all the beef was under the hot water for a period of time and then let it drain and then I put it on some paper towel and patted it dry and then I was able to transfer it to the dehydrator okay so a begun the process of mixing the bread crumbs into the ground beef and it's going to take a minute or two to need these two things together before I put them in the fry pan something I wanted to mention earlier hi still worth mentioning now is in the first half of this batch I put it right in the fry pan after I had broken it up or I broke it up in the fry pan I guess as an alternative you can take your meat break it up put it in boiling water and simmer it for a period of time before transferring it into the fry pan and by doing that quite a bit of the fat will float to the surface of the water so you've already removed a good amount of fat even before it hits the fry pan one thing that's going to be different I believe not having done this method before one thing that's going to be different is that I won't be rinsing this under the tap after it's fried up on the fry pan I'm going to have to use a slightly different method of removing any residual fat all right that's all needed in so now I'll put this in the fry pan and we'll cook it the same way so we expect this is going to cook up very much the same as the last batch did I don't know it'll take a little longer it seems to be a little thicker right now but when you need Hamburg it tends to get a little thicker as well so I'll work on this and get this all fried up and I'll show you what the next step of preparing the ground beef that's mixed with breadcrumbs is so now the second batch the batch of ground beef that was mixed with the breadcrumbs seems to be all nicely cooked up couple of observations one is I don't see any fat in the bottom of the fry pan this time not that there was a lot last time but there's zero left over now hey it smells nicer not that there was anything wrong with the regular of ground beef but this actually has just a nicer smell obviously due to the breadcrumbs the other thing it seems to have browned a little bit more again due to the breadcrumbs so the next step is to transfer this over onto a plate that has paper towels in it because we're going to blot or press out any residual fat that we can and as we dry it we may have to do say my understanding is that sometimes as it's in the dehydrator some of the residual fat will come to the surface now just before I do that I recognize that I did not say how much breadcrumbs I added to the ground beef truth is I didn't measure it it appeared to be between 1/8 and 1/4 of a cup so that was for a half pound I used will say less than a quarter of a cup for a half pound of beef so I might use half a pound or half a cup of ground breadcrumbs to a full pound of beef if I was to do this again I guess first we have to see how this turns out all right that looks like it's ready and now I'm going to transfer it over to the plate and see if we can't block any of the fat out all right already you don't like the smell of this hope this turns out well yes it does it look like it's gonna be better okay put the fry pan aside once I've got it presto tala show you the difference between with and without the breadcrumbs you know that's not soaking up much fat I am impressed and of course that has everything to do with the fact that I use the extra lean ground beef a little bit of fat maybe but not much okay and if you can see the difference make sure I'm in camera frame here this is the extra lean without the breadcrumbs and this is width you can see it's darker browner now I'm also going to do some measurements here just to see how much the weight is before and after cooking and I'll do that again after the dehydrating process I think it's interesting to know just how compact and how late like Whittle it'll get but these are now ready for the dehydrator ok my ground beef down to the dehydrator so the dehydrate has already been running you'll probably be able to see some meat inside of here that's not jerky that is for another project that I am making a video of so that one will be for a later date it is strips of the leanest beef that I could find it's cut very thin it has no spices no ingredients added to it at all I'm just drying it as dry as I can and I'm drying there to put a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit which I'm able to do with this dehydrator that I have it's a Hamilton Beach if anybody's interested and yeah so I'm going to set the dehydrated ground beef on two trays so I'll be able to distinguish them and on each of the trays I have a very fine screening so this screen is actually made from fiberglass screening that you would use for a storm door because the temperature doesn't get so hot that it affects the fiberglass but it does give me the smallest pore holes pore size holes or the smallest holes possible they still allow air to go through that a tray that or the tray liner that came with this is is like this and the holes in this as small as they are are still too large for the ground beef what happens as the dehydrated beef or as the beef dehydrates it shrinks ahead and fall through so I want to prevent that so it's I've been doing this for a number of years now using this type of screening and it's worked out very well you need in all three trays only two so I'll spread this out in spreading it out you wanted try to get it as evenly spread out and spaced around your tray as possible and and it's thinner layer as you possibly can now it looks like this is right at the limit of what I should have on a tray this is half a pound of the lean ground beef this is the one that's been mixed with the breadcrumbs but no that's gonna work okay I was a little worried that I had too much for this tray it looks like a half a pound is about the max one of these trays will hold and it won't take long before that starts to shrink and there's more space around the granules to allow even more airflow to go through put that one aside and here's the ground beef that has nothing added to it yeah that actually it's quite a difference there's a difference in volume as well as the color and the smell of the two types of ground beef so this is actually easily going on this tray try to get it evenly spread all right that looks pretty good I'll add those to the dehydrator now start this up but just before I do I have it set as I said for 160 degrees I think 145 is both the minimum you want to go for the raw meat definitely 145 or above for the cooked meat this isn't quite as critical however haven't been cooked it's not going to hurt it to to dehydrate a little faster like the higher heat will will cause it's gonna work out just fine how long I'm letting it go for six hours now and then I'll come back and have a look and I'll know by texture and I'll be able to show you that I'll know by texture whether or not it is ready all right I'm going to turn this on and we'll come back in six hours and see what it looks like okay seven hours of dehydration and here's what I came up with so this is the ground beef that did not have the breadcrumbs at it and it started out at 227 grams and is now sitting at 51 grams so you can see just how much moisture and fat was lost in the dehydration process on the other hand here is the the lean ground brief or extra lean ground beef that had some breadcrumbs and I figure it was about four grams of breadcrumbs I measured out a little later both the same amount that I added so we'll say 227 + 4 grams maybe just over 331 anyway at this point right now it is 96 grams so it is almost twice as heavy as the one without the breadcrumbs so yes there is some breadcrumbs added to the weight but even if you say four grams of have breadcrumbs that doesn't account for the difference what accounts for the difference is the fat and the moisture that's retained I got to be honest when I feel it and I'll bring it up close to the camera I don't feel any difference maybe a little you know they're both the same crumbly nests see if I can show you this this is the hamburger or the ground beef that was without the the breadcrumbs and here's the one that with the breadcrumbs to look at them there's a little bit difference in color and I might say that the one with the breadcrumbs the pieces are a little plumper but they look and feel very much the same so I'm not going to be using these right away in meals I don't have to I still have some one other meals that I've already prepared but I am going to need these in a month or two so what I think I'll do is I'll vacuum seal them and put them in the freezer and that extends the life the longest what I will have to do is at some point on a hike I will make when I'm making a video I'll use the one with the breadcrumbs and maybe I'll even make another meal and have them both just to give you a side-by-side taste test I guess if you will I'm quite interested to see how well these rehydrate they're supposed to but I understand okay let me just put those in a vacuum sealer and I'll show you what that looks like actually you probably like to see that happening don't we do that that I'll do start with the non breadcrumb version now the begum using is much larger than it needs to be for this process you know I find it I can sometimes reuse the bags if I well wash them out because they are a bit expensive so reusing the bags if you can if you can will save you a little bit of money I have written on here February 14th 2020 because that's today obviously and 51 grams so I know how much is in the bag and how much it's going to or how when I when I've made it so let's just put that in the seal is in the trough their Locker up okay I love this vacuum sealer folks I really do my wife gave me this a couple years ago as a Christmas present and it was probably the very base model from FoodSaver but I have done more sealing with it and experiment and then different things I mean that's as hard as a rock there is no oxygen left in that at all so I've already extended the shelf life just by removing the oxygen now if I put it in the freezer it'll extend it that much longer it's a great investment so folks really to investments would be just over here you already saw would be the dehydrator and this is one I bought myself when it was on sale the Hamilton Beach model I like it quite a bit there are better ones and if you want to invest in a better one I would recommend investing in one that does has more than just high low medium settings one that you can actually set the temperature and it gets above 160 just for doing meat with a course and investing in a food saver because you know they'll save you the money many times over that you would pay for in fresh fruit or orang freeze-dried foods even all right I'll just do the other one up and we'll go from there okay there we go I have two packages of dehydrated extra lean ground beef one just regular and the other one with bread crumbs I'm quite excited to try this one with bread crumbs to see what it's like and the reason I did that again is because I find the regular stuff when you make it very dry which gives you the longest shelf life takes a little bit longer quite a bit longer some in some cases to rehydrate in simmering water so this is supposed to rehydrate much faster and retain more flavor I guess we'll see so if I didn't mention it it's worthwhile exploring not only dehydrating extra lean ground beef but look at some of the other meat products as well because you can do chicken you can do fish and you can do pork you can probably do well you get certainly I've done it with venison as well I think you can do just about any type of meat I don't know of any that you can't as long as it starts out very very lean and then you'll be assured that you have the minimum amount of fat left over when you're finished because again it's the fat that goes rancid not the meat so much oxygen will deteriorate the me over time but as I said if you can get a vacuum sealed and put in a freezer you really extended your shelf life a long time so each of these packages represents a half pound of meat after or would have been a half pound of meat before is dehydrated so I guess how would I portion that out for a meal well for me a lot of my meals are soup based they I use a lot of dehydrated vegetables and and other materials to make a soup sometimes a thick soup but usually a soup type of a meal and again at the end of this video you're going to see a link to the video where I put those meals together so I would probably use about a quarter pound maybe a little less in that meal it doesn't represent a whole lot of protein but it does add some to the meal so yeah probably a quarter pound so in other words about half of one of either of these packages to any given meal so alright that's all I have to share with you today if you have any questions about dehydrating or any suggestions please leave them in the comment section below and in the mean time until I come up with another video get out and explore and take that path less travelled because it'll make all the difference bye for now

Channel: Mark Young

Views: 6,448

Keywords: Mark Young, Shunpyke Bushcraft, bushcraft, woodscraft, survival, hiking, fishing, camping, hunting, foraging, DIY, homemade, make it yourself, cooking, plant identification, wild medicinals, medicinal plants, edible plants, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Blue Mountain Birch Cove Wilderness, product reviews, primitive skills, firecraft, budget trail meals, dehydrated ground beef, camp cooking

Id: AuZq5KLRsE0

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020