Who doesn’t love a good burger when you are camping? My family sure does. When you ask my kids what they want to eat on a camping trip weekend they always say campfire nachos and hamburgers. (Every once in a while my youngest wants steak over the fire…and he usually gets it).
Deciding what to cook when you are camping can be a daunting task. You have to plan ahead, get your groceries…make sure you bring all the right utensils and kitchen equipment to cook what you have planned. We like to make a plan ahead of time and get our groceries before we leave. It just makes my trip easier.
Most of the time, I will either cook some stuff ahead of time or pack stuff for the cooler for easier travel. When we make burgers for camping, this is one of the meals I will package ahead of time so it can be easy and stay in the cooler with little to no prep before cooking.
How We Make Budget Burgers
My husband is a retired firefighter, he is used to making meals from the sales ad. I’m not as good at it as he is, but he can look at the Kroger sales ad and have our whole week planned out in a matter of minutes (usually costing us about half of what it does when I shop).
One of the items we always buy when it is on sale is beef brisket. Kroger will put it on sale usually every 6 to 8 weeks, and they price it at $1.99 per pound. If you know anything about cuts of meat, you know that brisket is a great cut of meat.
We make a $1.99 per pound brisket into a cheap hamburger by grinding it ourselves with our kitchen aid mixer and meat grinder. Then use it for ground hamburger meat…BAM…budget burgers that also taste great!
The first thing we do is trim the fat. We don’t take all of the fat off but most of it. We usually freeze the fat we cut from the brisket and save it to mix with any deer meat we might harvest during deer season to make venison burgers.
After trimming the fat, we will cut the meat into chunks and get ready to put it through the grinder.
We use our kitchen aid mixer with a meat grinder attachment to cut up the meat and mix it with the fat. My husband likes to use the medium attachment because the meat gets stuck in the smaller one. We will run it through the grinder twice before mixing it well enough to make burgers.
If we don’t have a trip coming when we buy the meat, I will use our vacuum sealer and package the ground brisket into one-pound packs to be kept in the freezer. When we do get ready to camp, I will thaw the meat out and make patties to take with us. As I mentioned before, I like to do most of my prep work before we leave. It makes the camping trip easier when you plan ahead.
Hopefully, you can find budget cuts of meat and use them to make your own ground burgers for much less than regular ground beef. You might also like our Beef Stew in the Dutch Oven if you enjoyed this post.
