Pieces of ham dry or freeze-dried. How to cook homemade freeze-dried meat

Steaming meat in fat for weight loss

For the first time I tried to make freeze-dried meat for a taiga-mountain hike according to the recipes of S. Shenderovsky and A. Lebedev. It turned out very well.

The video shows evaporation in a slow cooker. It is faster and more convenient than in a pan. The slow cooker decides when to finish the process: as soon as the water in the meat runs out, the temperature of the fat rises and the slow cooker turns off. The meat is softer and does not dry out.

Recipe

The amount below is not the same as shown in the video above, but the proportion is the same.

Lean beef in the amount of 6 kg was evaporated in two batches. The first batch used lard, the second - beef fat. Lard is easier to heat and has less waste. However, fat, in my opinion, gives the final dish with freeze-dried meat the best taste.

1. Characteristics of the first batch:

   • beef - 2.2 kg;
   • lard - 1.2 kg (after remelting - 0.8 kg).

2. Characteristics of the second batch:

   • beef - 3.8 kg;
   • beef fat - 3.6 kg (after remelting - 1.6 kg).

As a result, 3.8 kg of the finished product was obtained, consisting of approximately 2.3 kg of fat (0.8 + 1.6 - losses) and 1.5 kg of sublimated meat (that is, the meat became 4 times lighter). The product was packaged in 15 containers and used to feed 4 people for 15 days.

I bought the ingredients in a stall near the subway. Every day, fresh pieces of pork and beef are brought there, from which lard and fat are cut. Beef is sold at 315 rubles per kg, while lard and fat are sold as offal for 30 rubles and 25 rubles, respectively.

If you still take stew with you to the mountains, then this note is for you. Recipe for the preparation of freeze-dried meat.
Buy meat. Beef. It is important that the meat is as low fat as possible.

Cut into small pieces, remove all excess (pieces of fat / fat, cartilage, etc.)

Grind in a meat grinder or in a combine. You can not be afraid to turn the meat into "porridge".

Spread the meat evenly on the baking sheet. Salt and pepper liberally.

Put in a cold oven. 60-80° for 8-10 hours (depending on the amount of meat). Turn on the ventilation or open the oven door a little so that the evaporating moisture escapes. It is necessary to completely dry the meat, turn it into croutons.

After an hour, remove the baking sheet and loosen the meat. The smaller, the better - then it will be easier to pack.

Voila :). "Archiving" almost 4 times.

Comparison with stew.

In a 325 gram can of stew, about 50% meat + fat. Of these 50% percent, 30-40% is meat, that is, in 325 g of meat stew, about 110 g, the rest is fat and water. If you go hiking for two weeks, then you will need about 25-30 cans of stew (for a group of 6-8 people). One can weighs (gross) ~ 400 g, that is, only the stew weighs about 10 kg. Plus, after use, there remains a difficult jar, which also has to be carried. There are about 3 kg of meat in 25-30 cans of stew. We bought 5 kg of beef and dried it. Received 1.25 kg of dried meat. 5 kg of beef cost us 1500 rubles. One can of stew costs from 80-130 rubles, depending on the manufacturer, quality, etc. My climbing friends charge only 130 rubles each. For simplicity, let's take 100 rubles per can, i.e. 25-30 cans will cost 2500-3000 rubles.

The shelf life is quite long. A few months for sure. And more is not necessary. Enough for a hike.

Total

Freeze-dried meat
Weight - 1.25 kg
The cost is 1500 rubles.
Volume - 3 liter bottles of milk or juice.
Features: natural product! Who knows what the stew is made of? No waste.

Stew
Weight - 10 kg
The cost is 2500-3000 rubles.
The volume is crazy.

Remarks

For cooking, dried meat should be boiled well so that it takes on water. Those. adding this product to cereals, like stew, will not work very well. However, there is always room for experimentation in the culinary arts.

Freeze-dried meat is much lighter than usually stews, which many still out of habit take with them on a hike. And in the stew, if anyone does not know, somewhere around 66% of water, which is not at all necessary and even undesirable to carry with you. On long autonomous hikes, when weight saving plays a big role, they try to save on everything they can. And today I would like to tell you how to cook homemade freeze-dried meat.

Making freeze-dried meat at home

In case you're not aware, on an industrial scale, freeze-dried meat is cooked under vacuum, ridding it of all the water it contains. The result is something like dry meat powder. This year we tried to buy it, 100 grams of meat costs about 300 rubles in Moscow, enough for one time.

But firstly, not everyone can afford it, tourists, poor people, and secondly, I personally did not like this powder at all. But homemade freeze-dried meat can be prepared by yourself. You can cook freeze-dried meat from pork or beef, this is not for everyone. I will tell you about two options for how to do this.

Option 1 - “dried freeze-dried meat”

1. Scroll the meat through a meat grinder or cut into small cubes about 1 * 1 cm.
2. Boil until tender with seasonings and salt to taste.
3. Put the resulting mass on a baking sheet and dry in the oven at a temperature of about 50-60 degrees. The cooking time for such freeze-dried meat is about 5 hours.
4. Don't forget to stir so it doesn't burn.
5. We pack the resulting product in any convenient container (more details below)

I myself did not cook such meat, but experimenters say that weight is reduced by about 4 times. They also say that 5 kg. dried meat fit into a liter bottle.

To prepare such freeze-dried meat, I think you need 300-400 grams of the original product per person for 6-8 people.

Option 2 - "fried freeze-dried meat"

This is how we have been preparing sublimated meat for many years now, so I will tell you more with examples and numbers.

We need meat and lard in a ratio of about 2: 1. They never counted exactly on a person at a time, but the approximate consumption: 4 kg. meat, 2 kg. fat for 6-7 people for 2 weeks. You can guess for another amount.

1. We take the fat and turn it through a meat grinder or cut it into small pieces.
2. Put in a frying pan and melt the fat. We will fill them with our ready-made freeze-dried meat during cooking and for better preservation.
3. Raw meat is also cut into small pieces somewhere 1 * 1 * 1 centimeter and put in a large saucepan.
4. After the meat is all cut and put in a pan, fill it with fat melted from lard. The meat should be all covered with fat.
5. We turn on a slow fire and begin to cook the meat. Approximate cooking time 4-5 hours.
6. In the process, water will begin to evaporate from the meat and bubbles will go. Moreover, at first the water will be cloudy, since it is a mixture of soda and fat, and gradually it will become more and more transparent, since all the water will evaporate. Bubbles will also be rare large at first, but gradually there will be more and more of them, and the size of the bubbles will become smaller. Until you have foam from small bubbles floating on the surface of the transparent melted fat.
7. Do not forget to stir the future ready-made sublimated meat so that the pieces do not stick together, especially at the very beginning of cooking, and so that the meat does not stick out on the surface. Well, we make sure that nothing burns.
8. After the sublimated meat is ready, we lay it out in a suitable container. The main thing is to do it right away, until the meat with lard has frozen. We put the finished product in the refrigerator to cool the meat, or on the windowsill.

The weight reduction is the same as in the first option - somewhere four times. From 4 kg. meat and 2 kg. fat we got somewhere around 1.5 liter juice boxes.

Container for ready-made homemade freeze-dried meat

There are two options here:

1. Small bottles with a dose of meat for 1 time. it’s convenient that you took out such a bottle for dinner or breakfast, cut it, took out the meat and don’t think about anything else. Disadvantages: usually small bottles have a narrow neck - it is inconvenient to pack freeze-dried meat.
2. One large bottle or box for the entire supply of meat. It is convenient, respectively, in that meat is put into the wide neck of such a bottle or box with an ordinary spoon. Disadvantage: you will have to divide the meat into portions by eye. But you can give out a large portion of meat on difficult days, saving on free days.

Actually, how to pack freeze-dried meat:

The easiest option is juice boxes. But they will have to be wrapped in several bags and sealed with tape, since it will not be possible to close them hermetically. And in the heat, the fat melts, and there is little pleasure in spilling this fat into a backpack and getting an appetizing-smelling sleeping bag, which is unrealistic to wash off on a hike.

As small disposable meat bottles, you can take 150-200 gram yogurt bottles with a screw cap. The same bottles, but large and with a wide lid, can be taken for the entire supply of meat. I came across very convenient plastic jars with Nesquik lids.

Storage of freeze-dried meat

Such meat boiled in fat is stored for a very long time at any temperature. I read about an experiment - a box of cooked meat was placed on a working battery for a month. After no change in taste and smell was noticed. We dragged him on a hike for two weeks, also did not experience any problems.

Eating freeze-dried meat

Dried freeze-dried meat is poured with boiling water for ten minutes, then poured into a pot with porridge or pasta. Fried we just added immediately to the porridge. The bottom line is that you need to give the meat time to soak up the water that it was deprived of.

And yes, in terms of taste. I love the meat prepared according to the second option, because it tastes like ordinary fried meat, and not like an incomprehensible powder, as in the first case or as in the purchased version.

If someone does not know, then

Recipes for cooking meat and fish for food layouts on a hike. The main goal is relief compared to stew and canned fish and the rejection of vile stew.

Dried meat

Bought beef tenderloin. Cut into pieces like chops - about 5 mm thick. A little repulsed and salted, sprinkled with salt and spices. In salt stood in the refrigerator for about 1.5 days. Then they pulled it out, mechanically cleaned it of salt. They put it on the newspaper for the night, periodically turning over and changing the newspaper. In the morning, they hung it on a cunning home-made structure made of rope and barbecue skewers and transferred it to a dark, cool place. Dress the whole structure in a shroud of gauze. From the street, the meat on the balcony, in the shroud - that's another sight.

The output turned out like this: 9 kg of fresh meat + 1 kg of salt and spices = 3.200 g of dry meat. Drying time - 3 weeks. By increasing the drying time, it is possible to dry up to 2500 g (approximately). The result is salted meat, cut with secateurs. Salt was chickened out so as not to carry weight. Transferred in cellophane.

Dried fish

“Before drying, the fish must be salted. I recommend selecting carcasses weighing up to 1 kilogram. They can be of any size, and the fish itself can be of any kind. The fish is placed, sprinkled with salt and shifted with bay leaves, as with spicy salting. Install oppression. Salting lasts 2-3 days. After this time, salt, spices, mucus are thoroughly washed off the fish and wiped dry with a towel, then hung out to dry. As a rule, the fish dries up already on the 3-4th day.

Bought TUNA fish. Everything is according to the recipe, only it dried for 2 weeks. Yield: from 3500 g of fish with heads - 700 g dry. Transferred in cellophane, if a bite. Next year I will try fish soup and mashed potatoes.

Source: Homska recipes. I recommend you go and have a look. There are wonderful photos of the results of the work of the supply manager.

Homemade "freeze-dried" meat

1. Raw meat finely cut into pieces of 5-10 mm. It is better to cut the meat slightly frozen. Put the meat in a pan of a suitable volume (it seems to me that it is better if it is stainless steel).
2. Prepare rendered lard. To melt the fat easier and more completely, you need to scroll it in a meat grinder, melt it in a pan and drain it through a strainer into a separate pan. The ratio of meat and melted fat is 3:1 by weight. Here there is a slight difference from Andrey - he has a ratio of approximately 2.2: 1. Probably due to the fact that he cut into larger pieces that fit less tightly and require more fat to cover them. Salt is added about two teaspoons per 1 kg. I salted both meat and fat.
3. Pour the meat with most of the fat. Reserve about 1 tablespoon (20 g) of fat per package for final sealing (more for wide bags). On cold meat, the fat will immediately solidify, so at first the fire should be weak, and you must constantly turn the mass over until the fat is completely melted.
4. Boil on low heat for 5-6 hours. Choose a mode when boiling is on, but not very intense. Stir from time to time and make sure that the pieces do not stick together, do not stick to the bottom and do not protrude. The broth will be cloudy at first (a mixture of water and fat), then it will become clearer and darker. Boiling first with rather large rare bubbles, then small and frequent, at the end the surface is covered with fine foam. Probably, you should not strive to evaporate all the water to the end - no matter how you burn it. It seems to me that it is quite enough to leave 10-12% of water, which approximately corresponds to a decrease in the initial weight of meat by 4 times. You can count like this. For example, you make meat from 6 kg of meat and 2 kg of fat (after rendering). We consider fat to be 100% fat, meat (lean veal) - 18% protein, the remaining 82% - water. We will assume that all fat and protein will remain (something, of course, will fly away with a “smell”, something will stick to the bottom, but we will consider this insignificant, do not take it into account at home anyway). Total 0.18*6000+1*2000=1080+2000=3080 g of protein and fat and 6000+2000-3080=4920 g of water. If we evaporate to a total (including "packing" fat) weight of 3500 g, then in the final product we will have 3500-3080 = 420 g of water or 12% of the total final mass. And from the meat there will be 3500-2000 \u003d 1500 g or 1/4 of the original weight.
5. The resulting product is placed in a suitable container (tetropak milk / kefir bags, aluminum foil cups). I tried to pack it in kefir bags, it turns out fine, but half a kilo fits in there - this is too much for my family group. It is convenient to make cups from household aluminum foil. It is necessary to take a thicker, “heat-resistant”, and roll it in two layers on a round stick or a square bar of a suitable diameter. It seems to me that the optimal diameter / side is 5-6 cm. It will be less inconvenient to put meat there. Fold the bottom neatly and tightly, you can even secure it with some kind of adhesive (painting) tape. By the way, for greater disinfection, the foil can be calcined in the oven, but such a trick will not work with tetra packs. Spread the meat with a spoon, slightly crushing. Leave to cool. When it cools, there will probably be uncovered pieces of meat on top. Melt the "packaging" fat and pour. After hardening of this top layer, close with a suitable lid - another tetra pack or foil.

To make one serving (the equivalent of one 325 g can of stew for four people a day), homemade requires approximately 77 g of meat and 26 g of fat. To pack 180 g of a briquette (in terms of protein, this is the equivalent of 325 g of a can of stew), you need a piece of foil about 15x40 cm, its weight is about 5 g.

Sources: Andrey Lebedev

Update February 2009: I used this recipe for cooking meat for a grocery layout for a winter solo hike in the Ukrainian Carpathians. It turns out FULL SCORE! Delicious, easy and convenient. You can cook quickly even at -20: there is nothing to freeze, you can pick it off with a knife and eat like that . The only issue I noticed was the packaging. It is difficult to securely pack so that it is convenient to get it. I used tin cans from salted nuts.

Update September 2010: took with him for a week in the Alps, temperatures from -2 to +20. After returning home, it stood for another week on the windowsill - it did not deteriorate. I used tin cans for tea as a container.

dried meat

1. For drying, it is better to take beef or lean boneless pork. Peel off the veins and grind in a meat grinder into minced meat. Ready-made minced meat should not be used for drying! From 1 kg of raw meat, 310 g of dried meat is obtained.
2. The cooked meat is salted, as for cutlets, and then laid out in a frying pan without oil. After a while, water comes out of it. Water can be drained, and its residues can be evaporated until it disappears completely. In the process of evaporation, the minced meat is crushed and turned over so as not to burn. As a result, it acquires a uniform gray color, after which it breaks into pieces of 15x15 mm and is laid out on a baking sheet in a preheated oven.
3. The meat is dried for about 1 hour at a temperature of 100 degrees, as it dries, the temperature drops to 50 degrees. Every 20-30 minutes it is necessary to check and shift the meat so that it does not burn. The finished pieces should be dark brown, crispy and not squeezed by the fingers.
4. Packed first in a bag of thin paper, then in two plastic bags. For long-term storage, it is advisable to put a note indicating the date of manufacture and the amount of raw meat. Storage: normally dried meat is stored at room temperature and in a dry place for 1.5 years or longer. It is not recommended to store in the refrigerator, because. there is a possibility of moisture.

I think if you have ever gone on multi-day hikes, then towards the end of the route you were visited by thoughts about food, about what you would eat first when you get out into civilization. Usually tourist cuisine, if it is a sports trip, does not shine with frills. Yes, and there is no time and energy to cook exotic dishes, all the energy is spent on overcoming the planned route, and you dream of a restaurant. And why not diversify the tourist cuisine with pre-prepared dishes. I think everyone will be pleased to enjoy seafood risotto in the mountains, or hodgepodge, or maybe homemade chicken noodles. You will not find such delights in ready-made sublimates. But with a little imagination, a little effort, and gaining experience, you will more than recoup your efforts. Just imagine that after a tiring day of walking, you just want to stretch your legs in a sleeping bag, but not to conjure over the boiler. But you take out a bag of dried, for example, beans with eggplant, from your backpack, throw it into boiling water, and after 10 minutes you have a delicious dish on your table. When I started using homemade sublimates, my dreams about food somehow faded during hikes, and my brain began to devote more time to enjoying the beauty that I see around me, since then sublimates began to form the basis of an easy and tasty layout.

In addition to saving time on cooking, when organizing layouts on sublimates, you also significantly save gas, which also needs to be hauled on the hump. In one of my articles, I already gave an example of how much less gas can be spent when using sublimates and radiator boilers, here is this calculation.

And ready-made sublimated dishes can be stored for quite a long time. Even without the use of a vacuum packer, while storing finished products in ordinary plastic bags, I did not notice any deterioration in the taste of home-made sublimates after six months of storage.

In fact, the process of sublimation at home will be difficult to repeat. In order for the structure of the product to be close to natural after its restoration, and the taste to be natural, the sublimation process was invented. How does it happen on an industrial scale? The product is first subjected to deep freezing in order to preserve the original structure as much as possible, after which the whole thing is placed in a vacuum chamber, and as you understand, a deep vacuum is created. At low pressure, dehydrogenation occurs very quickly. But let's leave the theory and try to do something similar at home, without the use of specialized industrial equipment. Let's agree that further I will call sublimations and the sublimation process precisely home-made products and, accordingly, the process.

To dry food, you will need a household dryer. They are of two types. The convection dryer is the most common and cheapest type of household dryer. They are sold in many household appliance stores, and are relatively inexpensive, of course, there are copies and completely non-budget ones. As a rule, they are not designed for a large load and have a low heater power, which is unacceptable for preparing food for a hike. Try to choose a dryer with a maximum load (number of pallets), and a heating element power of more than 500 watts. Dryers with solid trays, where the fan drives warm air stupidly up, are better not to buy. Take a closer look at the devices where convection will occur as shown in the following picture.

In this case, if we completely fill the pan, the air will still continue to circulate. On solid pallets, it is necessary to ensure the passage of air, thereby reducing the effective loading.

The second type of drying cabinets are infrared dryers. They are much less common, more common in industrial designs. The cost of infrared dryers is 2-3 times more than that of convection dryers. But this is offset by the drying speed, which is 2 times higher than that of a 700 W convection dryer, and a larger load. The drying process in such devices is similar to drying under the sun. Such dryers are produced, for example, by Radiozavod. In my opinion, sublimates dried in the infrared way recover better and faster, although this may just be self-hypnosis.

My first dryer was a Supra convection dryer. After it broke down and the money was returned to me for it, I purchased the infrared version Summer Resident 4. Although there is no timer in the summer cottage, and you need to follow the drying modes yourself, this pays off with a much higher drying speed and almost twice the load. If you suddenly decide to stop at the Dachnik dryer, be careful, the temperature at maximum power is quite high, and you can burn the food.

I do not recommend using ovens for drying. The minimum temperature in most of them is too high to dry the food, and they just burn, and the design of the ovens does not provide moisture removal, so you have to keep the door open. You will only suffer, spoil a bunch of products, and waste time.

In order to dry soups and main dishes, you will need sheets for making marshmallows. If your dryer is equipped with these, then great, if not, then baking paper is fine. It is desirable that the paper has a good non-stick coating, otherwise the finished product will stick to the sheet, and it will be difficult to separate it from the paper. Depending on the design of the dryer, the sheets will have to be cut in different ways, it is necessary to ensure normal air circulation inside the dryer, do not be greedy, try not to completely cover the tray with a sheet, give room for air to pass along the edges, otherwise the hot air simply will not reach the upper trays.

I also warn against filling the dryer trays too densely. In this case, the products turn sour before they have time to dry, since the temperature inside the volume of the dried products turns out to be favorable for the development of bacteria, and the drying time increases. In this case, you will smell sourness. So don't be greedy. It is better to spend a little more time than to throw away a bunch of products and waste time.

When you completely clog the dryer with food, even if you followed the recommendations above, the food on different trays will dry at different rates and you will need to swap them around.

For each dryer, it is necessary to select the optimal drying process. Therefore, for the first time, it is better not to cook any delights, but to experiment on something cheap and easy to prepare, so that it would not be a pity to throw away the product, in which case.

The basic principle of preparing fast-recovering freeze-dried food is that it must be completely cooked before it can be sent to the dryer. Some of the things we are used to are prepared slightly differently. For example, soups are not boiled, but stewed, and before drying, they do not look like soup at all.

Not all products recover well when we pour boiling water over them, if the products are not properly prepared, they will be tough and will not pick up enough water when brewing. And such dishes will also have to be cooked for a complete recovery, but our goal is to make a semblance of sublimates. Let's take it in order.

Meat

To prepare any home-made freeze-dried dish containing any meat, it must be pre-processed so that in the finished dish, after restoration, it is not tough. In fact, you won’t get the usual pieces of meat in home-made sublimates, it will be more like meat powder. But where to go? I am not a vegetarian and I do not plan to refuse such a valuable product during increased physical exertion.

Dried foods should have a minimum amount of fat. Fat begins to taste bitter and give off an unpleasant odor. Therefore, the meat should be with the lowest content. I prefer to use chicken and beef for cooking.

To harvest meat for freeze-dried meat, you will need a meat grinder. I use a conventional mechanical

The cost of such meat grinders is 5-10 times lower than electric ones, and I rarely use it, so the manual version suits me perfectly.

Beforehand, the meat must be cooked: boil (and use the broth for further cooking), bake, and at least for a couple, since most often I use chicken, and I feel sorry for the time, I cut it into thin plates, about 5 mm thick, and fry it dry frying pan, fry this thing for 2-3 minutes on each side. It is not necessary to fully bring to readiness, the main thing is that the meat will become tough, and when scrolling through a meat grinder, it will turn into a relatively fine mass. Even if you use ready-made minced meat, after frying it still needs to be twisted, otherwise the meat in the finished dish will not recover. An exception is chicken, which can be cut into small pieces after heat treatment so that the structure of the meat is felt in the finished dish.

Thus prepared meat is added to both the first and second courses, and already with the dish is subjected to final heat treatment.

You can fry finely chopped onions and grated carrots in a small amount of oil, mix the frying with cooked meat, and dry it in this form. This product is used instead of stew, it can even be added to ready meals to increase their calorie content. When compiling the layout, I take such meat with frying for one serving of about 25-30 g.

cereals

Almost all cereals are perfectly restored after sublimation. But it is better to boil the legumes during cooking more than you do for regular cooking, so they will then draw water into themselves much easier.

Vegetables

Hard vegetables such as onions and carrots should preferably be finely chopped, and the latter I generally grate. During frying, finely chopped foods require less oil, and, as I wrote above, cooking oil should be used as little as possible.

I'm too lazy to put potatoes in soups. After restoration, it turns out not so tasty. Therefore, I most often use ready-made dry mashed potatoes, which I add at the very end of cooking, thus it is also a thickener for our semi-finished product. And for the dryer, the thicker the product, the better - nothing leaks anywhere and does not stain our dryer.

Zucchini and eggplant can not be crushed. In large pieces in the finished dish, they look even more attractive when everything else is crushed as much as possible.

canned food

Sometimes I didn’t have enough time for all this cooking before the trip. One of the dishes I bought ready-made canned eggplants in adjika and canned beans, mixed all this in a one-to-one ratio and dried it. It turned out very tasty, though not so economically, but in any way cheaper than purchased sublimates.

In addition to such canned food, olives with olives are periodically used in a variety of soups, in addition to them, I also add capers to the hodgepodge, and pickled cucumbers to the pickle. I also often use seafood, all kinds of green peas, corn. A good addition to many dishes are all sorts of sauces. Just do not put a lot of tomato sauces, they can spoil the future sublime.

Purchased sublimates

Of the companies that sell sublimates at more or less adequate prices, I can recommend