Dehydrating Mince

[Nuts]

Iv'e been drying various veges for a week or so, today was mince day.
Its a simple exercise so i thought i'd show. Probably not so much advice for the experienced but more for those who have pondered buying a dehydrator and getting away from packaged food. Here is enough for perhaps 10/15 Big meals.:

* Buy mince from a butcher, what drying mince shows straight up is just how much water the supermarkets can get meat to soak up!
* In the pan is 2.5kg of mince (a generous sprinkle of garlic (powder-nice and strong), about 100g's of (no salt) tomato paste and an a good doloping of bush tomato sauce are added late in the cooking).
* No oil, turn it regularly and chop it with that plastic LMF strainer or something similar.. (makes the job Much quicker)
* Usually do 2 lots (5kg) like this, it will fill 5 trays of a standard ezi-dry dehydrator. Broken up well before drying it takes 7/8hrs, generally let it cool t room temp before giving it another blast for an hour or so. I don't bother to rinse mince, it drys and re-hydrates well enough so long as it is of good (ie low fat) quality to start. This is just standard beef mince but game meats work even better, i did a batch of wallaby for myself and it was awesome (though it does seem to have a smellier exit )

So its pretty versatile stuff, spag bol, shepherds pie, meat patties, m/bread burritos so on... all solid traditional fare high protein, low weight, hardly any fat left. I'm not sure on the life, We put it in 1kg fruit tubs and in the freezer, make enough for a few months. Rehydrated it comes back very much like a fresh meal, haven't yet had a freeze dry mince that comes close! (and tried many)...

Luverly Jubbly

[Nuts]

And the finished product, around 1/4 to 1/3 original weight and half the volume:

The tomato concentrate gives it a nice red hue and full flavour (100g's isn't much paste). Works well with the range of recipies and additional flavourings for various meals.
(It has stuck/clumped together a bit in drying but do break up the 'wet' clumps well before drying..)

Enjoy

[John Sheridan]

Thanks for the info i want to Dehydrate some meat to add to my cupa soups, pasta and noodles and probably other stuff too

Just got to buy a Dehydrator and get my *&%$#! in gear, should be ok now that I am on my Holidays and have some time.

Just wondering how long does it take to rehydrate the meat using boiling water, just need to know If I needed to do it separately or in a meal all at once, I will be cooking in a pot cosy.

Cheers.

[corvus]

If you can be bothered rather than buying Mince from Butchers I find it worth while to mince my own (I use an old fashioned hand mincer) blade steak on the bone for around $8.00 per kg is good value but remember you do need some of the fat for flavour and I normally just dry fry mine without any extras b4 the dehydration process so that I can use it for a variety of dishes
corvus

[Nuts]

Arrr, right, reminded of the point about garlic. Its a natural preservative, inhibiting the growth of bacteria (so i figure a healthy dose is a good thing).
For the various concoctions I mentioned, additional ingredients (chili or oregano or bbq/worcestershire sauce etc) change the flavour for the recipe and overpower the garilc/tomato.

I have ground game meats but get the beef mince for $10/kg (so no, can't be bothered )

Anyhow...vac seal day today!

[Mark F]

I started dehydrating last summer when preparing for the AAWT. I found kangaroo mince was good for dehydrating - very low fat and $8 kg from the supermarket. I did a mix of individual ingredients and prepared meals. In the bush I preferred my prepared meals over concocting my own each evening. The individual ingredient flavours didn't seem to blend as well. I did carry a little tabasco sauce to spice things up if I felt like it.

[Nuts]

I've no problem with eating skippy but many do, also a bit weary about the wallaby mince available here in Tas (in feeding others).
We do break the mince into the various meals before hand. Vac sealing it (ie with dried tomato/bay/various italian herbs for one) seems to draw in a lot of flavour.
I took a few snaps of some creative vac sealing ideas, might share some of those 'secrets' (dun dun derrrrr) at some stage.

John, it does rehydrate pretty well (and quickly) I would imagine it would work ok with cosy cooking. I tried some the other week just brought to the boil, sat aside then repeated and it was soft enough.

[Orion]

Mince?? Is that Aussie for ground meat with spices?

What I've heard and read but haven't tried myself is that the trick to getting dehydrated ground meat to rehydrate well is to add some bread crumbs to the meat, to the tune of about a cup of crumbs per pound of meat (522 ml per kg).

The only flesh I've dehydrated so far is shrimp.

[Nuts]

Shrimp, that's like one of our prawns little cousins right?
It actually re-hydrates quite well Orion. It does help to be very finely separated before drying. It looks all clumpy in the pic but will crumble into grains quiet easily.
It does make nice patties/ burgers by adding various crumbs.

Do you use the word for anything? (Mince)

[Orion]

I thought prawns were a specific type of shrimp but I'm not an expert. We sometimes say camarones since California is slowly being retaken by Mexico.

Here, mince means to chop very finely. There's also something called mincemeat which for some reason nowadays usually has no meat in it. Its basically chopped up fruit and lots of spices. Nasty. I like your version better.

[gayet]

Here, mince also means to chop very finely, the 'mince' referred to here is very finely chopped meat, just we got lazy and dropped the second word. Mincemeat (one word) as in dried fruit etc has been largely replaced by fruitmince, to avoid confusion. It does make rather nice little tarts, if you like that sort of thing - now is the season.

'Mince' is basically any finely chopped or ground meat - beef, lamb, pork, chicken, whatever you wish. What you do with it after that is up to your imagination and digestion.

[michael_p]

I've had success with the very low fat "5 star" mince from Coles. Cooked with no extra oil but some spices it comes out very well (after all the extra water boils off of course).

And I have tried dehydrating the mince with bread crumbs. To be honest I really couldn't tell the difference between with or without bread crumbs, maybe I didn't do it right. Must try this again.

I read somewhere else that you should put the mince through a food processor after dehydration. The argument being that the smaller the pieces the easier it was to re-hydrate. Has anyone tried this?

Cheers,
Michael.

[Nuts]

Food processor is interesting, i really don't think it would be necessary. We bought a box of Settlers mince, besides the taste its powdery texture gave it three thumbs down. I'd happily buy mince if someone made one with taste/ good texture/no additives.

Orion, have you tried eggs Ovaeasy? Im on a search for decent dried eggs. A world wide search reveals that these are the ducks guts of dried eggs?

[Orion]

Nuts, no I haven't. So far I haven't had dried eggs of any brand twice.

[Macca81]

I thought prawns were a specific type of shrimp but I'm not an expert. We sometimes say camarones since California is slowly being retaken by Mexico.

Apparently, they are different...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp


Everything you read on Wikipedia is true, isn't it?

[icemancometh]

Nice, love my roo so gotta try this.

Would've thought more oil than normal for cooking roo as it's so lean already.

The chilli does go down well but your audience must be prepared or they could be in for a rude shock!!!

[Nuts]

Just use a non stick pan imc and regulate the cooking by temperature. The fat doesn't dehydrate so is left to become rancid (and re-hydrating takes longer apparently). Some also rinse the remaining fat off cooked mince for this reason.

Game meat works very well. I recently tried some wallaby thin sliced and made into Stroganoff(?), it was great!

[John Sheridan]

Some people pour boiling water over the meat in the colander, other just strain it and then pad off the fat water with paper towels, which I think works just fine, keeps more of the flavor. Also you can take the meat out of the original cooking saucepan and drain all the water and oil and put the meat back and cook it some more to boil off the moisture and then put it in the dehydrator, they say that makes it easier and better to rehydrate.

Either way it works out fine and you have nice meat for your camping needs that can be stored for years at least in the freezer for your recipes

Cheers.

[Nuts]

Yer, that's the idea, did try that method at one stage.
I have read 12mths in a freezer.

[MartyGwynne]

Hi there.
I just put a few posts up on the dehydrating recipes with photos of my achievements (I have not used it yet)
I did some chicken and some beef, trimmed of fat and then ground up by hand mincer.
It looks OK.
This now gives me a good base to make several different meals.
Marty.

[Nuts]

Yes, looks mighty tasty viewtopic.php?f=16&t=8667

[Orion]

I thought prawns were a specific type of shrimp but I'm not an expert. We sometimes say camarones since California is slowly being retaken by Mexico.

Apparently, they are different...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp

Interesting, thanks for that. For what it's worth I dehydrated a homemade meal that had "Argentine Red Shrimp" in it, which it turns out is in fact a type of shrimp, not prawn, despite the fact that they are fairly decently sized.


(Wikipedia) 'Australia and some other Commonwealth nations follow this British usage to an even greater extent, using the word "prawn" almost exclusively. When Australian comedian Paul Hogan used the phrase, "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you" in an American television advertisement,[4] it was intended to make what he was saying easier for his American audience to understand, and was thus a deliberate distortion of what an Australian would typically say.'

Before Mr. Hogan appeared on the scene a fair number of us in the US weren't even aware that Australia existed... "There's land down there??"

[walkinTas]

Before Mr. Hogan appeared on the scene a fair number of us in the US weren't even aware that Australia existed... "There's land down there??"

What, not a yachting fan then? Remember? ...about six months earlier there was this little race called the America's cup.

[Orion]

What, not a yachting fan then? Remember? ...about six months earlier there was this little race called the America's cup.

No, I'm not a fan although I enjoyed following the Sydney-Hobart race since I was in Tasmania at the time. I suspect that most Americans think of yachting as a sport only for the rich, kind of like polo or fox hunting. I can't think of anyone I know who is a yachting fan. The America's Cup is actually coming here to San Francisco soon.

[walkinTas]

OT: Totally OT and so I'll end up having to moderate this thread, but I was a bit surprised Paul Hogan's ad was the reason American got to hear about Australia. That ad campaign was in '84 following the Australia II success in the America's Cup at the end of '83 when the Alan Bond's sponsored boat skippered by John Bertram with the famous winged keel designed by Ben Lexin, won the cup, ending the USA's 132 year winning streak. I would have thought the whole USA heard about that. Certainly the whole of Australia did. I was in Fremantle in a few weeks ago and took a walk around the Maritime Museum and a good look at Australia II.