Directions

1Choose extra-lean ground beef for dehydrating, as fat increases increases the chances of jerky spoiling instead of drying, or going rancid. Ideally, you want to use grass-fed ground beef or ground round that has 7-15% fat. PRO TIP: If you want your dehydrated ground beef to be more tender when you rehydrate it again, add breadcrumbs to the mix. Use ½ cup of breadcrumbs for every pound of ground meat.

2Cook the beef without any added ingredients (seasoning, oil, etc.) until it’s well done.

3Before you make “hamburger rocks,” you need to make sure that you’ve got all the fat out of the cooked meat. To do that, you’ll need a colander lined with cheesecloth.

4Put the ground beef in the colander and strain every bit of fat that came out during the cooking. Then rinse it out with boiling water to really make sure that you’ve got all the fat out. It might take you a few rinses to do a thorough job!

5Although it might sound like overdoing it, it’s important to minimize the amount of fat in the meat because it’s the first thing that goes rancid, and it will significantly decrease the shelf life of your “hamburger rocks.”

6Pre-heat the dehydrator to 155°-160° F for 30 minutes.

7Place cooked and rinsed ground beef on dehydrator trays, and use parchment paper to line them or the fruit leather inserts. This way the smaller pieces of meat won’t fall through.

8Depending on your food dehydrator and the type of beef you chose, it might take you anything between 8 and 12 hours until the ground beef is completely dried. The “hamburger rocks” are not ready to be stored until they earn their name by looking like literal pebbles.

9Once the meat cools, you can store it in glass lid jars or vacuum sealed bags. Just make sure that the container is airtight.

10Prepared like this and properly stored, dehydrated ground beef can be kept safely for years. However, if you add breadcrumbs to the mix, the shelf life decreases to a year, at the very maximum.