[PREP] dried meat -- food to last

vlad

Inactive
I bought beef bottom round, trimmed all visible fat and made jerky. After 24 hours in dehydrator I ground the jerky strips in my meat grinder to make meat powder.

one cup dried jerky powder weighs 4 oz = 10 oz fresh meat

1 cup meat powder, 2oz sunflower oil,ground cayenne and cold water in a jar (shake well) makes a quick sustaining meal. Meat powder, oil, ground cayenne, cheese and hot water in the blender makes a delicous instant soup.

(Edited to add this info) 100 grams (3.5 oz) ground cayenne contains 16 grams protein, 56 grams carbs, 76 grams Vitamin C and lots of other goodies.
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl?cayenne

Add a cup or two of ground jerky powder to pancake and cornbread batter. You'll like it
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Dried Meat, Food to Last

Mongolian food is rather simple and nourishing. Encounters with different cultures in the course of centuries long wandering across Europe and Asia did not affect the basic diet of nomads, comprising mainly of various combinations of meat and flour.

Life in a saddle, frequent moves in search of better pastures tending their herds prevented Mongols from developing a sophisticated cuisine.

But while Mongols failed to come up with a wide variety of dishes, they mastered what was available to perfection, especially when it comes to meat. There are dozens ways of cooking it: boiling, frying, drying, steaming or smoking.

Here we give a description of how borts (bour- tsi), or dried meat is made-- an ancient way of preserving meat through long harsh winters or marches across continents

As soon as the first cold winter days settle in early December, most Mongolian families set out to store meat reserve.

As a rule, one cow and up to seven to eight sheep are sufficient for a family of five to last through long and harsh winter, until diary products become more available during spring livestock breeding season.

Beef is the meat of choice, but each region has its own specifics. Herders in the Gobi Desert store mostly camel meat, while mountain tribes prefer to slaughter a yak or goats.

First, fresh meat is cut into long, 2- 3 cm thick and 5-7 cm wide strips, then hanged on a rope inside a gher, just under the ceiling where air circulates freely.

Within a month, the meat dries up. Once all the moisture evaporates, meat strips turn into hard, wood-like sticks of a slightly brownish color. The stripped and dried meat of one cow shrinks enough to be easily fit into the animal's stomach.

When the borts is ready, it is taken down and either broken into small pieces, 5-7cm long or minced. The borts is put into a bag made of canvas that allows airflow in and out. Borts can be kept in such bags for months and even years without losing the qualities of meat.

Dried meat is an ideal food for travelers. On long marches, Mongols simply take out a stick of dried meat, powder it and add to boiling water to make a cup of fresh and nourishing bouillon. Even nowadays, many Mongols take a small bag of borts when traveling to faraway places for study or to live.

"I survived the wet and cold winter only by making a cup of borts soup once in a while," says a Mongolian journalist, after spending six months on the Atlantic shore of England.

page 90 Wilderness Cookery by Bradford Angier
Meat is the one complete food. Plump fresh meat is the single food known to mankind that contains every nutritional ingredient necessary for good health. It is entirely possible for man to live on meat alone. No particular parts need be eaten. Fat juicy sirloins, if you prefer, will supply you with all the food necessary for top robustness even if you eat nothing else for a week, a month or a decade.
Every animal in the far and near reaches of this continent, every fish that swims in our lakes and rivers and streams is good to eat. Nearly every part of North American animals is edible, even the somewhat bland antlers that are not bad roasted when in velvet, to the bitterish gall that has an occasional use as seasoning. The single exception is the liver of the polar bear, and of the ringed and bearded seal, which at certain times become so rich in Vitamin A that it is well avoided. Juicy fricasseess, succulent stews and sizzling roasts are fine fare.
If anything, most of us would be happy eating more of this ideal grub which contains all the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients necessary for full vigor. One way to acomplish this? By not passing up the birds and small game which are freely available to many of us thoughout the entire year and which if not eaten will only be wasted.

from Wilderness Cookery by Bradford Angier
Drying is the simplest way to preserve meat. Cut with the grain. Cut lean deer, moose,elk, caribou, beef and similar red meat in long strips 1/2 inch thick. Hang strips not touching on bushes, etc. Lay on sunwarmed rocks. Turn every hour os so. Smoke from a small fire of non-resinous wood keeps flies away. Season to taste with salt, pepper, thyme. oregano etc. Dry meat until hard, blackish., leathery. Jerky keeps indefinitely if kept dry and away from insects. Trim visible fat for long storage. Jerky alone lacks sufficient necessary fat for the long-term. Supplement it with fats.

from Arctic Manual by Vilhjalmuir Steffansson
On a diet of straight meat (and fish), cut fat and lean into inch cubes. Eat one fat, one lean. When fat no longer tastes good, eat just lean until you are full. If fat makes you nauseous you are eating too much of it. The Eskimos he saw were a strong, healthy race and they subsisted on a diet which consisted largely of meat and animal and marine fat. The fat included large quantities of whale blubber. Yes the Eskimo did not suffer from obesity. If meat needs carbohydrate and other vegetable additions to make it wholesome then the poor Eskimo were not eating healthfully .. they should have been in a wretched sate. On the contrary, they seems to me the healthiest people I had lived with."

Farming for Self-Sufficiency John & Sally Seymour page 117
Biltong is salted and dried strips of buck meat or beef and it is almost worshipped by South Afrikans. Living in the back-veld of South West Afrika, as I used to do, biltong formed an important part of my diet. If I shot a gemsbok or a kudu I would turn a very large part of it into biltong. I have made it in Wales since then, in fact I made some last year, out of beef,
and it has been perfectly successful. The only drawback is you need prime cuts really; biltong made from odd bits of scrag end is not really much good.
But this is the way you do it. Cut lean meat up in strips, say an inch square but the longer the better, along the grain or fibre, of the meat. This is most important: do not cut it across the grain. Lay it in dry salt for six hours. Wash the salt off it and hang it - if in southern Afrika in the dry season - in the shade but in the breeze - if in the British Isles in the chimney. I leave mine in the chimney, in light smoke, for say three days, take it down, hang it up in the kitchen, and it is perfect biltong. It is as hard as hickory. To eat it you just pare or shred little shavings off the end of it across the grain with your Joseph Roger 'Lambsfoot' knife (old back-velders will know what I mean), put it on bread and butter, and it is delicious.
 
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night driver

ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
U can attest to the longevity of jerky if it is from the leanest possible meat (we use london broil or eye of round), properly marinated (yes I DO use a salt 9of some type, it varies) marinade (with spices) for 24 hours in the fridge and then drop the strips into the Excalibur and the Snackmasters for an additional 12-20 hours.

The slices (mose 1 or 2 inches by 1-4 inches depending on the cut of meat) come out kinda like bat wings or meat chips.... they are DRY!!! If i store them wrong they absorb moisture from the air and get softer but that means they won't store as long.

My whole meat jerky has lasted 4 years in, well let's call it marginal, storage conditions. They were in ziplocs, in a large can, under a chair in a fishing cottage in WNY for 4 years, winter and summer, temp changes etc. They were still edible without any of the attendant "issues" that we had with some of the "jerky sausage" we made from ground meat.

We dried them the same way (20ish hours at 105* IIRC) but the fat content (that that didn't melt out and virtually RUIN one Excalibur) went rancid over a year. THAT "jerky" was a quick ticket to restored regularity, if ya take my meanin'.....


Properly dried jerky ought to store for a LONG time, And to think that when we were MAKING it (in 1998 and 1999) we were reading storage lifetimes of 6 months MAX IN THE FRIDGE......


chuck
 

A.T.Hagan

Inactive
From Bradford Angier: "Plump fresh meat is the single food known to mankind that contains every nutritional ingredient necessary for good health."

So that it won't be lost I want to emphasize this one point here. FRESH meat does contain sufficient vitamin C to prevent scurvy in an all meat/fat diet. Once you preserve the meat (as in drying it or some other preservation method) you change the nutritional composition of the meat.

LEAN dried meat can keep very well. Jerky made from game meat such as venison is damn near fat free. Jerky made from select grade or better meat (pretty much what is found in U.S. supermarkets) is going to have enough internal fat that even if you trim all visible fat off it's not going to keep as well as lean venison. Nevertheless, properly done it can be kept quite a while. Dry the meat until it snaps when bent and then either vacuum seal or pack with oxygen absorbers for the maximum possible shelf-life. Curing agents like salt and nitrates/nitrites are not necessary, nor is pepper, sugar, etc. Those are merely flavorings.

A bag of jerky, a sack of pinole' (dried, parched, ground corn), and some pemmican if you're in a cold climate, can take you a long way. Not nutritionally complete, but it'll take you a long way before you begin to notice any nutritional deficiencies.

.....Alan.
 

Satanta

Stone Cold Crazy
_______________
Nice write up tho there are some fish and amphibians that can kill you if you eat them. The Puffer fish comes to mind-a delactassey in Japan but you sign a release before eating-just in case.
 

vlad

Inactive
So that it won't be lost I want to emphasize this one point here. FRESH meat does contain sufficient vitamin C to prevent scurvy in an all meat/fat diet. Once you preserve the meat (as in drying it or some other preservation method) you change the nutritional composition of the meat.

Thank you for pointing that out.

I forgot to mention that 100 grams (3.5 oz) ground cayenne contains 16 grams protein, 56 grams carbs, 76 grams Vitamin C and lots of other goodies.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl?cayenne
 
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Onebyone

Inactive
Thanks for the info.

Another thing to get your Vit C if you don't have a garden close by is a handful of pine tree needles in a cup of boiling water. Let it sit for 5 to 20 mins and you have vit C. Pine trees are over almost the whole country so there is no reason anyone should experience vit C lack.

Also though most animals may be edible you really should cook them and not just eat the fresh meat as some animals like rabbit have diseases that humans can get and cooking kills it and parasites. I believe bear in another one.

BTW, Vlad if you eat 3.5 oz of Caynne in one meal you are going to get the runs in most cases ;) unless your internals are made of iron.
 

vlad

Inactive
I no longer try to grind dried meat in a meat grinder.

It is much easier to beat the dried meat to small pieces, and do it in my Corona corn mill.
 

Grantbo

Inactive
This is Grantbo
I jerk the bottom round. Like Alan says, I cut of all the fat. I've soaked in all sorts of marinades (sp) and rubs, but what I like the best is: Caveman: salt and meat, Caveman with a ton of cracked pepper and Tobasco soaked meat overnight.

I do have a huge problems in storing my jerky. It won't seem to last even 5 days.









Why?


















Mary's daughter and her 3 crumbcrunchers. They wipe me out! :spns: :groucho:
 

Old Gray Mare

TB Fanatic
Salt has been used to help yank the water out of meat and fish in the past, either with brinning or just packing it in salt before further procvessing such as drying, jerking or smoking.
 

Txkstew

Veteran Member
Anyone try grinding up lean meat, then dehydrating it? Would it dry faster, or clump up and take for ever? I bought an Excalibur but haven't done any meat yet. Do you use the plastic grates that come with the machine? Or do you need something smooth to lay the meat on?
 

Satanta

Stone Cold Crazy
_______________
Anyone try grinding up lean meat, then dehydrating it? Would it dry faster, or clump up and take for ever? I bought an Excalibur but haven't done any meat yet. Do you use the plastic grates that come with the machine? Or do you need something smooth to lay the meat on?

If you are using strips lay them on the plastic grates for air circulation.

I have two dehydrators but before those I would cut the bottom wire of a non-painted clothes hanger and bend both cut ends into hooks, string my jerky on the bottom and hook the ends then hang in a place that gets some good dry air and is a little warm but not hot.

I've done ground beefbut it didn't really appeal to me once dried so grind if you want but it is not neccesary unless you have no teeth.

BTW-you can starve to death full on rabbit.
 

ainitfunny

Saved, to glorify God.
I have bought dried beef, but after a while it turns dark instead of the red-brown it was when it was new. Does the darkness of the (OBERTI or other name brand) jerky(storebought ) mean it is no longer good? it has a fairly quick expiration date.

Most of the information (recipes) on HOME drying beef only give it a really short shelf life.
 

hotncold

Contributing Member
"BTW-you can starve to death full on rabbit."

LOL. Yup food ain't nec food. You can eat bark and starve. Snails now.....
HNC
 
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