Dehydrating Meat: Beef, Chicken and Tuna

it's March the sun is shining the snow is melting it's time to dehydrate some food for some summer trips hey folks today I'm going to dehydrate some meat I used to cook my meat with my food and dehydrate the whole meal together but I found that my meat will rehydrate better if I de hydrate it separately from the rest of the meal so today I'm going to do some beef some chicken and some tuna and I'm going to show you some tricks that I use so let's start with the beef trick one is that I boil my beef instead of frying it I find that frying Sears the meat and hinders the rehydration process so all I do is drop small amounts at a time of meat into a boiling pot trying to create small small pieces and I'll give it a stir just to break up any chunks that are still in there and then I'll cover it and bring it to a boil so what you'll do is you'll drain that meat in a colander and most of the fat will wash away with the boiling water but another trick I do is I pour even more boiling water over that meat to ensure that I really minimize any fat on that meat now let's do the chicken the trick I use for chicken is I pre cook it in a pressure cooker first the pressure cooker really breaks down the fibers of the chicken to a point where it number one dehydrates very well but also rehydrates very well so just load your pressure cooker and follow the instructions to bring it up to temperature I usually cook chicken for about 15 minutes and then I cool off my pressure cooker and pull the chicken out you can see the fibers of the breast meat are already starting to separate a little bit that's really good that's what you want first I'll cut my chicken up a little bit just to help it cool off because it's very hot and hard to handle then next I'll take a couple forks and try and pull the meat apart trying to create very small strands of chicken and eliminate any lower large chunks once the chicken cools down you can use your hands and break it down a little bit further and there you have it a whole bunch of chicken ready for the dehydrator too now the tuna is the easiest dehydrate that straight from the can for best results I try and use solid white tuna I try and get albacore in water not oil really important that it's water tuna is the easiest all you do is take it out of the can dump it into a bowl and break it up a little bit trying to make sure that you don't have any really big chunks in there so there you go at about half an hour I've prepared all three meats ready for dehydration so my dehydrator is all ready to go I'm going to use these drying sheets on my dehydrator and I'm simply going to put my meat each tray so you want to load up each tray careful not to overload any tray this is also your last chance to look for any chunks that you can break up it's really important that air gets to circulate around all your meat last thing you want to do is set the thermostat on your dehydrator to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and turn it on it's a good idea to check on your meat every couple of hours into the process this is three hours later turn off my dehydrator and open it up and that looks like the tun is doing really well I'm just flipping over the the meat so that the moisture sides are more exposed to the air rotate through all the trays check all the trays chickens looking really good almost dry actually and ground beef is the last it's looking pretty good too it'll take a little bit longer than the others yeah so I'll just rotate the trays and turn back on the dehydrator wait some more so after about six hours of dehydrating the chicken is nice and dry ready to be put in bags and so is the tuna it's really reduced in size and really reduced in weight the hamburger needs a little bit more time and after about eight hours let's check out the beef looking good nice small crumbles I can break the pieces and they they're just a little bit tender not completely brittle which is good because I boiled this meat and because I poured more water over it I I've gotten rid of all the fat I haven't had to dab this at all you don't feel or see any any oily residue at all so that's ready to go so I've dumped my trays into a bowl just to make it a little easier to handle and I'm going to spoon my meat into a ziplock bag I will label my bags and keep them in the freezer till I need them so I've carried out the weight of a ziploc bag which is about 6 grams 2 cans of tuna weighs 72 grams 2 chicken breasts weighs 97 grams and my beef which originally weighed 1.1 kilograms now weighs 228 grams

Channel: Kevin Outdoors

Views: 128,252

Rating: 4.9430404 out of 5

Keywords: dehydrating meat, dehydrating tuna, dehydrating beef, dehydrating ground beef, dehydrating chicken, chicken, beef, tuna, ground beef, nesco, dehydrator, pressure cooker, camping, trail food, dehydrated meals, backpacking, canoe trip, hiking

Id: Zba3N9H6fTE

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2016