As most of my readers know, I have become something of a “prepare for survival” enthusiast, not entirely crazy given that I live on top of one of the biggest and most active earthquake faults in North America, a crack that has already rock-n-rolled once to great effect within the past 20 years in my home town.
But I’m trying to get ready to make it through many different kinds of emergencies in reasonable style, even long term problems that might last for a year or more. This involves some long-term storage of foods, and while rice and beans are cheap, easy to store, last a long time, and you can live on them in good health, a constant diet of them will blind you with boredom within a short time.
Yeah, I have sufficient supplies of both, but I have other staples as well.
One of the biggest problems for me was finding a way that I could stay on my no-carb diet through a long-term emergency. You can can meat, but I haven’t tried that yet - and figuring a pound of meat a day, canned meat takes up a lot of storage space.
Then I ran across something called “hamburger rocks.”
Here’s the recipe I use:
Any quantity of lean ground beef: I buy 93% lean hamburger from Costco in a package of six 1 pound chubs for 14 bucks a pack.
Thaw the ground beef and dump it into a large pot - you want three or four inches minimum above the top of the meat.
Cover the ground beef with water to near the top of the pot. Bring it to a rolling boil and let it boil for 15 minutes. Break up the larger chunks with a spoon or whatever works - I use a metal “squiggly wire” potato masher. Dump the cooked meat into a colander and let it drain. I also spray it with the sink spray-hose, using the hottest water I can get to wash off as much fat as I can.
Wipe out the pot to remove any fat and return the meat to it. Refill with water, bring to a boil, and boil again for fifteen minutes. Then let the pot cool and place in the frige long enough for the remaining fat to float to the surface and harden. Skim off the fat.
Drain the cold cooked meat, then run it through a food processor just enough to get it grainy, but not a pate-like paste. You can add spices and seasonings at this point. I just add a good chunk of iodized salt. Spread this on cookie sheets, pizza pans, griddles, or whatever in a thin (no more than 1/2″) layer. Place in oven at 200 degrees for about 10 hours, or however long it takes to reduce the meat to a dry, crunchy consistency. You can speed the process along by stirring the meat as it dries. If you’ve done it right, each pound of burger meat will reduce to about 3 ounces of burger rocks.
You will end up with something that looks like this:
For storage, I buy new one gallon paint cans from Home Depot. Fill them with the burger rocks, toss in some oxygen absorbers, and tightly seal the lid. Stored like this, the burger rocks will last at least five years. They’ll go for two years stored in an unsealed container, as long as they are kept dry.
One gallon paint can holds the equivalent of sixteen pounds of raw, de-fatted, dehydrated burger meat. Reconstitue with about twice as much liquid as burger rocks. It works great in things like spaghetti sauce or casseroles or soups. About 1.5 ounces of burger rocks provides 46 grams of meat protein, which is the most complete and easily digested protein you can get.
You can also mix it 50-50 with lard (by weight) to make the original Amerind-style pemmican (the notion of adding dried fruits to pemmican came from European settlers, who liked the taste - the Indian version was nothing but dried meat and fat). Pemmican, stored so it can “breathe,” (to prevent moisture buildup) will last up to 20 years at room temperature (actually, considerably above and below room temp).
I like the taste of the crunchy granules all by themselves (the salt makes them very snack-like in texture and taste), but it’s easy to much them like peanuts, which is a waste of very high quality protein. One can will provide an adult with a month’s worth of protein at 46 grams per day, or two months at 23 grams per day.
You can buy dehydrated meats at several survival-prep suppliers online. Gram for gram of protein, burger rocks are about one quarter of the cost of the commercially made stuff.
Have you got any home-brewed long term storage recipes? Canned, dried, however or whatever?
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
According to google, 1.5 ounces = 42.5242847 grams, so I think there may be a slight issue with your numbers.
I’m a munchy fiend, and the lack of crunchy food to graze on is the toughest part of the low carb diet for me. I might have to give this a try. I’ll probably heavily season it with dried herbs.
Have you tried this with ground pork? Is there any reason it wouldn’t last as long with other meats?
I knew there would be a smarty pants in the crowd, so please note all the “abouts” scattered around.
Here’s what I know: the ground beef I buy is labeled as containing 23 grams of protein per four ounces, or 46 grams per half pound. Thus I arrive at the notion that the dried equivalent contains that much protein.
Now, the one number I really mean “about” is that six ounce per pound dried versus raw. I used an old postal scale that was cheap to being with. It might actually be saying 5.5, or 6.5. It was a tetch past the six ounce mark, so maybe it’s really 6.5 ounces. If so, one quarter of that would be 1.625, and that multiplied by the number of grams in an ounce, 28.35 (rounded) equals 46.01 grams.
Are you happy now, oh Analosity of an engineer?
Unfortunately with pork, you just can’t get enough of the fat out in order to get it to a hard dry - or so my research indicates. It works fine with beef, chicken, lamb, and fish, though.
Bah, that’s too bad. I have a source of very good, cheap ground pork.
Yes, I am happy, actually. Using that calculation, you can double check to make sure your final product is actually properly dry. From your calculations, it looks like it is. Better to find out now than after the SHTF.
DocOb, I looked into it a bit further, and it seems that fat is the issue. My suggestion would be to take some of your ground pork and handle is as advised for ground beef - maybe boil it ten minutes or so longer each time. Then dry it at no more than 200 degrees for as long as it takes to get it down to a dry, finger-crumbly texture. You shouldn’t be able to feel any moisture at all, and you should be able to crumble it to a fine powder.
If you can do that, I don’t see why it wouldn’t keep just as long as ground beef. If you do try pork, let me know how it turns out, wouldya?
Yeah, I will, but I’m going to do beef first, as a control, since I’m an anal engineer.
Yeah, but … if it kills him, how is he going to report?
I guess good old fashioned salt pork like the cowboys used to carry around (if you believe Louis L’Amour) won’t last long enough.
I’ve dried fruit, potatos, fish, onions, …
The potatos are still good after at least a decade. I’ve been known to double preserve. Dry it and then throw it in the freezer.
My wife cans fruit. Particularly strawberry jam. Darn good. Easy enough, just a standard recipe. Fresh tomato’s are excellent as well for tomato juice and the tomato for cooking with.
The ground beef recipe is the same as what we do for backpacking trips, except for the big can. We also dry tomato paste. Combine the two with pasta for spaghetti. It always tastes better on the trail.
We dry seasoned beef strips, cut from london broil, for beef jerky. For short term use we do not dry it all the way, for long term it must be “crispy”.
I could live on dried and canned goods for a long time.
Why would it? Boiling it for half an hour, then drying it at 200 degrees farenheit should kill anything nasty, and once thoroughly dry and stored in a vacuum, I really don’t see what’s likely to jump up and get you.
Do you use a dehydrator or what?
Bill, I’ve been checking out “survival” websites lately. On one I saw a suggestion for using dry ice to replace all of the air in a container with nitrogen. Don’t remember the formula, but basically you place a small piece of dry ice on top of the food and let it “melt”. The nitrogen falls and forces out the air (and thus, moisture). Probably wouldn’t be worth it if you’re doing one can at a time, but something to consider researching if you do several at a time.
For tomato paste, we spead a thin layer on a metal cookie sheet and put it in the oven on the warm setting with the door open slightly. Once dried, you can roll it up. You can do the same with puried fruit to make fruit “roll ups”.
We have a dehydrator for the jerky. Around my house, when the children are home, a full load of jerky never comes out of the dehydrator. It gets eaten long before being dried out unless I stand over it with a baseball bat…
How do you store it? How long will it last?
I have a couple cans of dehydrated tomato powder I bought commercially for a similar purpose. And I am laying up a significant amount of dry pasta.
Hmm. I may have to test out a recipe for spaghetti made entirely with dried ingredients and water. Hamburger rocks, tomato powder, dehydrated onions and mushrooms, garlic powder, my secret ingredient. Add some lard for calories, toss the whole thing into the solar oven….
Or, hm. Wonder if I could just premix portion sizes with everything but the water and grease…?
UPDATE: Or, there is commercial dried butter available.
LCB - yeah, I’ve run across it. It works best with the expensive plastic pails with the sealed lids. I’m buying cheaper pails from Home Depot and using heavyweight mylar bags and oxygen absorbers. Supposedly the nitrogen will leach through the pails sooner than the sealed mylar bags will lose their seal against oxygen.
Ummm…OK, I’ve been hearing too many car tire commercials on the radio for nitrogen inflation. Dry Ice replaces the air with CO2…apologies…
http://www.dryiceinfo.com/food.htm
From your link, LCB
Oxygen is not required for fermentation. Moisture is, but then it is also required for the oxygen consuming forms of decomposition.
This CO2 method, therefore, still requires drying. One wonders whether it would add any more protection.
Still, the same argument holds against throwing dried food in the freezer, which never stopped me from doing it.
It has the consistency of leather when dried. It is often called tomato leather, or fruit leather when made of other fruits. We just roll it up and put it in ziplock bags. I don’t know how long it will last. It’s something we do a few days before a trip, so it gets consumed within a week or two. Googling it leads me to believe it is not viable for long term storage over a month or so.