dehydrated hamburger?

What it is is a recipe for an E. Coli infection.

Not to be flippant (flipping?), but I've been down the dried burger route on long hikes, nevermore. The problem seems to be that dehydration and preservation are not necessarily synonymous in the case of animal protein, especially fat-laden ground beef.

Ground beef, fully cooked. You use as lean as you can get (say 7% fat). Then rinse off the meat using hot water to remove any leftover fat. Put on dehydrator trays (parchment paper lined) and dry at 155-165* till dry. You will want to crumble it as it dries. It looks like gravel, hence why many call it hamburger gravel.

As for E Coli? Well, the meat is cooked beforehand so that destroys it. The biggest issue one would have is fat left behind and it goes rancid. Rancid meat has a very obvious smell.
Hence, the suggestion is to keep your dried meat tightly sealed in your freeze till trip time – and to cycle through every 3 months your stash.

Substitutions would be freeze dried ground hamburger (packit gourmet carries it) and TVP "beef" (Harmony House Foods).

Jay,

Try using kangaroo mince from Coles or Woolworths. It comes in a 1kg prepacked bag in the fresh meat section. As Sarah recommends, it's very low fat (around 3-5%), and cheap $6.99kg Also a lot more environmentally sound.

I like to make it up into a sauce before rehydrating. The bag it comes in is also pretty good to repackage in, provided you wash it out well.

If you Google "Rod Lawlor"+Kimberley, you should come up with a trip we did up north. This included lot's of dehyd meals. Minced roo and minced chicken was my protein of choice.

i'll have a look at kangaroo mince. I love kangaroo steak if its cooked right.

When you cook your ground beef first and rinse it with boiling water as Sarah mentions… and dehydrate it at a minimum temperature of 155ºF you will not have issues with eColi.

The eColi issue was more with jerky making using ground meats that were not cooked.