Meat Preservation

I've run out of space in the freezer. I wrote about my disaster a while ago when I accidentally switched the power off to one of the freezers and had to throw a couple of hundred pounds worth of food out. I've slowly built that up again over the last few months. I hardly notice it, if I buy a steak then I buy one for me and one for the freezer. If I make a lasagne or a meat-loaf then, no matter how good it is, the last piece gets frozen. It doesn't take long to build up a good reserve.

But it means I have to turn down bargains. My local supermarket has a really good butcher section. The meat is really good quality (it's not one of the national chains, it's a small, local chain that supports local producers) but it's pricey. But if you hit it at the right time (Friday evening is usually good) then there is always a fridge for high-quality produce for a couple of quid a portion.

Normally, I'd freeze it but I have no space. So, I'm experimenting with preserving it in other ways. Refrigeration is a recent development and we've got 10,000 years of history we can learn from.

I do a lot of pickling and preserving of vegetables but I've never tried doing it with meat. I've always been a bit wary because of the obvious safety issues with it. A bad tomato is a bad tomato. A bad piece of meat can easily sneak under the radar.

I've started with doing jerky and biltong. I love both of these as a snack but they are expensive. A tiny bag will easily cost £2 and it'll probably be loaded with preservatives and additives that I really don't want to consume. So using bargain meat as a base for making my own seems like a good idea.

Youtube has been my best resource for this. I've sat through a lot of meat drying videos. For biltong, my favourite so far has been a South African chef called Ben Kruger. Biltong is beef that has been soaked in vinegar, spiced, then air-dried over the course of a week.

You need a lump of very lean meat (fat spoils quickly). Slice it into 1.5cm pieces, coat with vinegar, let it sit and then apply biltong spice (a mix of salt, coriander and black pepper). After that you hang it in a biltong box (a box that creates the right air flow and environment for safe drying) for anything up to a week. Slice thinly then eat.

Ben's video is here and he has instructions on how to make a biltong box.

Jerky is different. It starts sliced very thin, maybe 3-4mm. There is no vinegaring but it can be soaked in a marinade and then spiced. Or not. South Africans are very specific about what gets called biltong. Jerky is a lot more vague. The drying process is different as well. It can be air-dried but most people seem to do it in the oven. You hang the pieces from a rack (or lay them flat), put the oven on as low as it will go, prop the door open an inch or two to create air flow and leave for about four hours.

A good video is from Kent Rollins here.

I've had a go at jerky. My first batch I did using a piece of cheap salmon and it was beautiful. I marinaded it in worcester sauce, soy sauce, a little honey and some vinegar. I added a BBQ rub then dried it in the oven for 4 hours. Turned out really nice.

My next batch was some scrap silverside beef. I think the oven was either too hot or the air flow was too low because I ended up cooking it rather than drying it. The result was OK but it was just pieces of over-cooked roast beef rather than jerky.

I've currently got a batch of biltong on the go. I used the other half of the silverside that I turned into jerky and made a small biltong box out of a couple of 1 litre yoghurt pots stacked on top of each other and a little fan to drive air through it. If it turns out OK then I might scale it up. I priced up parts for making Ben Kruger's biltong box on Ebay and it came to about 20 quid.

To be honest, I don't know if I am beating the price of shop-bought biltong or jerky but at least I know what is going into it.

I'm also salting some salmon. Salting is one of the oldest ways of preserving fish there is. I got a cheap piece of salmon that was reduced, lay it on a bed of coarse sea salt and then covered it with more. It's been in the fridge for about 12 hours and a ton of water has come out already. I've drained it and resalted. I'll see how it turns out.

The next project I want to do is making an Armenian dried beef called basturma or arpukht. This starts with salting a chunk of lean beef until it is hard, air drying it until it is really hard then applying a paste of fenugreek, pepper and paprike.

The recipe is here.

I don't know if this is a realistic way of saving money but it is just another way of using scrap meat that doesn't involve freezing it. Sometimes money saving is not everything, it is as much about not wasting produce.