Dehydrated rice meal: Beef and Peanut rice

in #outdoors3 years ago

As I continue to work on seeing how I can make easy and light camping meals I want to see if I can make Beef and peanut rice. The challenge is to make this in a boil once, one-cup configuration so that I can save weight on cooking gear.

Beef and Peanut Rice was a dish served by an Indonesian guy from a food stall at the University when I first started working there some time ago. At first he only had a gas fired barbeque underneath a gazebo but he graduated to an indoors spot and upgraded that spot after a year or so. He sold out the lease and moved off campus but I still have fond memories of the dish. I'm only making a cheap imitation, but good enough is good enough.

I'll skip the rice dehydrating photographs - I'm quite happy that 60 deg Celsius (140 deg Farenheit) for an hour yields good results. I also found that placing the rice in a flat ceramic dish gives good results without the mess of stray rice grains in the air-fryer.

img_0.8721953970373217.jpg

Here are the ingredients. Dehydrated rice, peanut butter, chilli sauce, cheese, pepper and dehydrated beef. I made the dehydrated beef by first searing some schnitzel in a hot pan without oil, lightly seasoning it, slicing and then dehydrating at 50 deg Celsius (~120 deg Farenheit) for about 3 hours.

img_0.09113964691434655.jpg

Place the rice into a dish with the beef on top. Add boiling water until the mixture is covered, place on a lid then cover in a towel for ten minutes. Stir some peanut butter into the top layer of the rice with the beef and add some chilli sauce. Cover for another five minutes. Then, add the cheese and finally dust with a generous amount of black pepper.

This dish was quite tasty, but chewy, Acceptable, even if not quite up to the quality of the Indonesian stall holder. There are a few things I will need to improve.

The beef lost a lot of flavour in the dehydrating process. I could still taste some of the searing but the meat flavour was weak. Flavour loss is common to dehydrated food and so I might try a few tricks to boost the meat flavour next time. From my experience with beef jerky, I developed a few secret techniques to super boost marinade flavours and I should be able to apply those to this. The challenge is that I don't want the beef to be overly spiced in of itself - it's meant to taste and feel like charcoal barbequed beef.

The beef did not fully dehydrately and so was quite chewy. The beef will need more time to rehydrate. I might have to cut the beef smaller and rehydrate the beef for a few minutes before I add the rice. I'm not exactly sure how to do this and remain within a one-cup, one-boil solution but I'll come up with something.

The final meal was a limited success, but will need improvement to become that end of day morale booster we expect out of a good hiking meal.

Until next time.

Sort:  

Makes me wonder how the Cherokee did it. I love dehydrated food, but hard to eat having had my teeth all removed in 98 from a crapy orthodontist.

Cool post regardless... love and light brother.

My understanding is that the native american indians, including the Cherokee made something called pemmican. Basically, dry the lean meat over a smokey fire and/or in the sun. Render tallow out of the fatty parts. Then grind up the dried meat and combine 50/50 with tallow. Optionally add dried berries, but it's probably better to keep those separate. Apparently pemmican can keep for quite some time and is quite calorific dense. Can be eaten cold, or cooked into dishes. The ground-up meat doesn't require teeth.

Nice rice long grains.

Hey, thanks. We have several types of rice for different dishes, but the everyday go to rice is usually Thai Jasmine Rice (Thai Hom Mali).

Yes, Jasmine Rice is premium rice which can be expensive here. I would probably buy this for my next meal prep

Congratulations @eturnerx! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You distributed more than 30000 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 31000 upvotes.

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:

It's today! Do not miss the opening of HiveFest⁵