Dehydrating ground beef is a super easy way to save money when you are an avid hiker or camper. Because let’s face it getting freeze-dried meals and meat for every outdoor endeavor can get pretty pricey. Your wallet can breathe today though because I’m going to share my recipe for dehydrated ground beef with you today.

Dehydrating my own ground beef was something that I always put off because I thought it would be so time-consuming. Turns out, it’s really not. When making a meal with ground beef, just cook up an extra pound or two that you can put to the side to dehydrate, and boom! the hardest part is over. The recipe below is for one pound, just double for two pounds. Check out the video here!

Dehydrated Ground Beef

Ingredients

• 1 lb lean ground beef (you should look to 90% or higher because the fat will cause faster spoilage.)
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs

That’s it!

Directions

1. In a bowl, mix together your bread crumbs and hamburger. The breadcrumbs are going to help keep your meat soft once it rehydrates, so it’s not hard like gravel. I like to use plain bread crumbs because I never know what I will be adding my hamburger too, so I don’t want it preseasoned. You can definitely add Italian breadcrumbs if you like though. Mix together really well so you can’t see the breadcrumbs.
2. Add your hamburger mix to a hot skillet and cook like normal. Make sure it is cooked all the way through.
3. Drain the fat off the hamburger. Again, fat will go rancid first, so the less fat the longer your beef will last.
4. Put hamburger in a colander and rinse with hot water, just to be sure you got as much fat as you could.
5. Pat the hamburger dry with a paper towel and get out as much water as you can.
6. Line your dehydrator trays with parchment paper, this way you won’t have hamburger falling out into the bottom of the dehydrator.
7. Set your dehydrator to 165 degrees. It takes about 8-10 hours to dehydrate, but I always check on it at around 6 hours.
8. Once it is hard and crumbly, it’s done!

This is super easy and will last for a few months stored in a ziplock bag. Rehydrate and enjoy in tacos, chili or whatever else you can come up with! Make sure to check out other camp cooking here!