Curing meat on the run

I checked with my resident expert, but she just growled and then chased a squirrel...

 

My dogs do it all the time, and dig up the results later and chew the whiz out of it....but then they tend to chew on cowpies as well, so don't use them as much of a test.......ahahaaaa

 

Most 'quick and dirty' meat preservation is going to involve lots and lots of salt, with maybe some smoking....the meat, not you...ahahaaa.

 

Someone needs to remind me in June and I will go dig a hole and bury a roast or something.

 

A persons stomach can tolerate a great many different things than we have chosen to in this modern society, it is usually a matter of conditioning ,more mental than physical .
Grub worms and maggots are completely eatable as well as many other bugs ,
If you start early in life, experimenting with eatable critters, your digestive system usually can handle more than your might think .
One valuable tool I support is apple cider vinegar because it helps with digestion and is a powerful natural antibiotic.
Just the other day I was getting the symptoms of flu in my stomach, and wasted no time in drinking a shot of vinegar .
Even if I misdiagnose my symptoms it can't hurt me, but the fact of the matter is I beat the attack . procrastinating and waiting till it got worse would take longer to beat it out of my system.
One of the reasons tomato catsup does not go bad is because of the vinegar in it .
Eating things that give me gas in my stomach , potatoes and beans in particular, I add either catsup that has white vinegar or strait cider vinegar if I have it, and I don't get any gas.
I am told old timers carried cider vinegar when they traveled the country.
Saved me a bunch of times from botulism .

 

Found a couple of interesting ideas.

The Turkish horsemen of Central Asia used to preserve meat by placing slabs of it in pockets on the sides of their saddles, where it would be pressed by their legs as they rode. This pressed meat was the forerunner of today’s pastirma, a term which literally means ‘being pressed’ in Turkish, and is the origin of the Italian pastrami. Could have been the salt in the sweat from the horse, I guess.

The other is hardwood ash. I can't find much info on it but what I did find suggest the ash could be used in place of salt to draw moisture from the meat, keep insects out and keep bacteria from forming. Ash and water create lye so there may be some validity to it. You wouldn't have to carry it like salt. Cook as much of a kill as you could using the resulting ash to thickly cover what you did not eat. Then, wash off the ash as you used it. There is some history of its use, just not much I can find. Might risk a pork chop or two on it.

 

@arleigh If you have experience eating maggots etc We need a post! I've had fried grasshoppers and chocolate covered ants and they arent bad but idk how to prepare them

I found these article useful

Underwater storage techniques preserved meat for early hunters

Outside-the-box meat consumption

Outside-the-box meat consumption

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Some of my favorite parts of Unlearn, Rewild are the chapters on meat, which present very outside-the-box thinking. Miles Olson was once a vegan, but he experienced a journey similar to mine and Mark's --- as he got closer to nature, he realized it made more sense to eat meat. That's where our paths diverged from Olson's, though, since Mark and I got into pasturing livestock and Olson got into...figuring out when roadkill is safe to consume.

Ever wonder if that deer by the side of the road is delectable meat going to waste, or is a case of food poisoning in disguise? Olson provides these tips for when to snag the carcass and when to leave it lying:

• If the hair pulls out easily when you tug on it, the meat is old and might not be safe.
• Clouded-over eyes are another indication of age.
• Rigor mortis is actually a sign of relatively fresh meat since the stiffness only lasts for a day or less.
• Big maggots are a sign of old meat. In addition, maggots will pre-digest your meat, changing the flavor (but not necessarily making it unsafe to eat).
  
• If it's cold outside, the meat is probably safer than if you found the deer on a scorching summer day.
• Smaller critters (like rabbits) actually keep better than big animals (like deer) because their guts are smaller and less prone to rupturing and sullying the meat.

Assuming you followed Olson's advice and decided the deer by the side of the road was safe to eat, what's next? Olson provided some tips we can all benefit from about aging meat, a process that makes meat more tender. He explains that the biggest danger in aging meat is promoting anaerobic conditions, often found in meat in air-tight containers and in ground meat. Excess moisture also makes meat rot instead of age. Olson suggests a couple of different ways to age meat safely, one of which is the traditional above-ground technique of hanging the meat in a well-ventilated area away from flies. The other is to emulate dogs and bury meat at least a foot deep to age the flesh slowly underground. It's handy to know that in a survival situation, if I killed a deer and had no refrigerator, I could bury big pieces of meat and eat them safely weeks later.

After aging, you'd think the next step would be cooking, but Olson actually eats most of his meat raw to prevent the formation of carcinogens during high-temperature cooking. Parasites can be a problem with raw meat (especially if you're eating omnivores instead of herbivores), but Olson explains that freezing meat for two weeks kills most parasites. Of course, you can also cook the meat to destroy most parasites and diseases (short of chronic wasting disease).

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Rather than cooking, Olson dries most of his meat. Although many traditional cultures smoke meat as they dry it, Olson is concerned about the carcinogenic nature of creosote, so he usually dries his meat smoke-free. He explains that if you put meat in a well-ventilated, stone hut in a windy place, the food can dry due to the action of wind alone, and I wonder whether you could create your own wind by making a black chimney rise out of a well-ventilated room (similar to the technique some people use to make smells from composting toilets move up and out of human range). Or you can simply dry your meat the same way you would other foods or clothes --- in a sunny spot away from flies, or in the warm area above your wood stove.

As a final note on alternative meat-eating, Olson does suggest eating some parts of the animal that most of us probably eschew. He says that livers, lungs, eyeballs, blood, and the fat around the organs of herbivores are all excellent dried. In general, high-value meats that we often ignore include adrenal glands (high in vitamin C), eyes (high in zinc), bones and soft, velvet antlers (mineral-rich fat), brains, pancreas (high in vitamin K2, which prevents tooth decay), and testicles.

 

Food for thought but times are gonna be hard before I eat the maggoty dried lungs of road kill.

Don’t doubt my resolve though. I will do anything that can be done by a Christian to promote the survival of my tribe.

 

Somewhere along the line I saw a resceipt for reparing spoiled meat, how to make it servable in some old cook book

 

Road Kill.... would you eat it? | Survival Monkey Forums

 

From the article you linked, it seems that one has to bury their meat in a dry area. Spring would probably not be a good time to bury meat.

I cannot believe that guy eats dried eyeballs. shudders

 

lol it was kind of gross