Dried jerky meat suitable storm preparation food?

Is dry jerky food suitable for storm preparation? I am not sure the word jerky is correct word. It can be dried turkey, chicken or beef. <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Dried jerky CAN be used for emergency supplies. It has good protein content, HOWEVER it also usually contains a good amount of fat and salt--and these items cause you to need more water intake. If water is not an issue, the long shelf life of jerky can be a plus.

I've put up a lot of jerky over the years. The problem with jerky is not spoilage in the usual sense, but mold. If you cure it dry, dry dry as a bone, or if you put onto it anti-fungals, you get no mold if you stor it right. But that is not very good quality to eat. I can't remember the exact numbers, but good jerky has still in it 10 to 20% moistured by weight.

Also, there are a lot of variables as to how you do it. Oven? Dedicated dehydrator? Smoke? Sun? Commerical stuff is obviously oven/dehydrator with smoke flavor.

But for usual conditions, eat it, and rotate it. It's great stuff. Throw a good chunk in a pot of cooking dried beans, and you are good to go.

I can turn you on to the the best turkey-jerky cooker in the world, if you want.

I think preserved meat, as a class of food, is one of the worst disaster foods available. Grains, pasta, peanut butter, etc should be cheaper, longer lasting, easier to store, and less dangerous if spoiled. This may simply be a reflection of my priorities: carbohydrates, fats, protein.

In her book Emergency food storage and survival, Peggy Layton wrote "We've all heard the saying, "You can't live by bread alone". I have the philosophy that you can live on bread and soup."

I think it's interesting. Learn to make your own bread with wheat, yeast, powdered milk and dried eggs etc. For soup you have instant bouillon beef and chicken, dehydrated soups and canned soups, stuff like that. You start with it and then you can expand your array of food. Of course you already pack a lot of water because it's not a challenge to store water, it can withstand extreme temperature fluctuation but just make sure to protect them from light.

For the backpacker and bug-out situations it's another matter of course. Chris K. made me aware of an interesting text by Brenda L. Braaten "Pack light, eat right". It has good information :

http://www.thru-hiker.com/articles.asp?subcat=12&cid=39

Frankie

I have one of those round dehydrators and it seems to work pretty well. One thing that has always bothered me about jerky is the excessive salt. What I thought about doing is taking plain, unseasoned meat strips, drying the meat as crisp as I can get it, putting it in the oven at +160 degrees for an hour, and then storing it in the freezer. I'm curious as to how long it might store that way. Of course this wouldn't be for snacking, but rather for soups and stews. Adding water should reconstitute it. Any thoughts?

Regards, Vince

There was a "Good Eats" (hosted by Alton Brown) on making Jerkey recently. One thing I remember from it was that when making jerky, you want to dehydrate it, not cook it, so any dehydrator that uses heat to remove moisture is less than optimal.

His solution? Sandwhich the strips of meat between furnace air filters. Looked like he had a sandwich of 5-10 filters, with strips of meat in the accordion folds of each filter, strapped together in a stack using bungie cord. This was then placed in an open window with a fan blowing through it. 8 to 12 hours later, jerky! <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

(Disclaimer: I never tried this. Don't even like jerky. But "Good Eats" is cooking for nerds. Good show.)

<<you want to dehydrated it, not cook it, so any dehydrator that uses heat to remove moisture is less than optimal.>>

That's what my dehydrator does. It adds a little bit of heat (probably around 90 degrees F.) and then just circulates this warmed dry air around the racks of meat. It works pretty good, much better and less messy than the oven, which is what I used to use.

The reason they suggest then putting the meat in the oven above 160 degrees F. for an hour is to kill any Ecoli that might be present on the meat. I have found that after 8-10 hours in the dehydrator, there is not much more that the oven can do to the jerky. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Regards, Vince

Those dehydrators are good -- better than the oven, in fact because they move air.

As for the salt -- well, you need a bit as a preservative. You don't have to gag on it. I have kept jerky in the freezer for a long, long time, not to prevent spoilage, but to keep it from molding. I jerked damn near an entire deer one time, and IIRC, we had forzen jerky that was great 1 1/2 years down the road.

You have to remember: if you have it dry enough, it will still suck moisture out of the atmosphere, and it will still mold. My living space runs about 40% relative humidity, and I can't keep it out for long. I would prefer that it be not so dry. If it breaks when you try to bend it a little, I think it is too dry.

The show good eats went into the stuff about all the little nasties that grow on food. First you cure the meat with a prservative solution....this kills the things that grow. Then it is dried...preserving it. Check it out on food network...I saw the show and it was excellent.

Alton Brown is phenomenal. I can't attest to his preparedness, but his cooking shows are fun (a little gimmicky, but informative), and none of his cookbook recipes have gone wrong for me.

Can anyone recommend a brand?

I just got fall 2005 Cabellas catalog, and there are a bunch in there.

What about using vacume sealing to extend the life of the jerky?

The only thing I have to go on is the good eats show....he said you should not put it into any 'plastic' bags as the bags hold the moisture right up against it and spoils it faster. He recommended to store it in a plastic hardside container.

True. If you vac pack, either eat it, or freeze it.

That's a good point about the salt. Most recipes I've seen tell you to marinate the strips overnight. The next batch I make I'm going to try simply coating the strips before drying them. That way (hopefully) only the outer layer will be salted. That's the only part that needs protection from mold anyway.

Regards, Vince

Most commercial jerky is way over salted. By doing it yourself you can control the amount. You do need some salt though. What it does is dehydrate any of the critters that try to grow on your meat. A friend Vlad by name has created what he calles a meat shake as part of his normal diet and as part of his food storage plans. Appearently he consummes them regularly. He grinds his homemade jerky into a powder.

meat shake
- one cup meat powder (=10 oz fresh meat, 50 protein grams)
- 1-1/2 oz vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon ground cayenne
- 1/4 teaspoon yellow curry
- 0ne pint filtered water........shake well..

Okay, we are talking about curing meat for survival preparations. Folks, how many times do I gotta repeat this: Pemmican is THE natural survival food. Let's take a look again at why this is.

Dried, smoked, cured meat. Okay the old fashioned method of curing meat was to air dry it or use a smoke house after brining the meat using a salt/sugar cure. Nowadays meat is cured using commercial curing compounds based on nitrites and nitrates, benzoates, erythorbates etc. Yeah, I know everyone is going to say "Gee all those preservatives, that can't be good for you". Well, how many hams, hot dogs, pepperoni pizzas, bologna sandwiches have we all eaten in our lives? I think the old fashioned salt cure was a lot worse on the body than this stuff is. Smoke cure, well, wood smoke has at least 11 known carcinogens in it. But it does make it taste better. The plains indians had a good idea of how to preserve a 6 month supply of bison by planking it in front of a big fire and letting it dry out, then packing it in clean skins coated with generous amounts of rendered fat (hmm, getting closer to the Pemmican concept). How they kept the meat from spoiling without a lot of chemicals, good storage techniques, or environmental controls must pretty much confound us modern day hunter gatherers.

So, what can we do with all that dried, smoked, salted meat? Well, we can break it down using grinders, molcahetes (mexican grinders by Manuel), or just beating the snot out of it with a couple of big stones. Once it is broken down sufficiently to be handled, we can mix it with some seeds, nuts, dried berries, dried fruits, dried vegetables, dried grains, and a little tallow. Wrap it with some saran wrap a few times, wrap it with aluminum foil a few times, and pack it away in the freezer, the refrigerator, the cupboard, a grub box, whatever your needs. When you are afoot somewhere, take a ball or two of this stuff with you. If your regular supplies should run out, or you find yourself in a "survival" situation, break out a ball and start eating. Want something warm instead, mix part of a ball with some boiling hot water for a few minutes and enjoy a hearty nourishing soup. I've had pemican balls packed thus unrefrigerated for nearly a year, and was just as good the day I used it as it was the day I made it. I've heard other folks who've used pemmican balls nearly two years old and incurred no problems. Yes, it is high in fat. Yes it has a certain amount of salt in it. Yes, you will need to consume water to digest it. Guess what, if I need to conserve water, I probably ain't gonna eat anything until I can find a decent supply.

So there, if you want to store meat for survival, do what the indians did. Either pack it in tallow, or turn it into pemmican. Forget the nutritional fo-pahs about consuming too much salt or fat, in a survival mode, you're likely to need more of both anyways, assuming you have a fresh water source to work with.

If it worked for native americans and fur trappers and explorers for hundreds of years, there must be a reason. It was the number one preferred survival food for them all that time. Of course the Army thought they could improve on this, thus the first "survival" rations our nation tried in the Civil War, mostly hard flat bread. Anyone else ever hear the reviews on how well that stuff was liked by the troops that ate it?

There are likely a lot of folks out there that haven't the pallette to handle pemmican. Our sedentary lifestyles have made us prone to avoiding such rich foods, which is a good thing, because most of us can't handle consuming 3,000 kcals per meal. But when you are humping hard just to get by, and everything you own is on your back and you've been hodding it around all day, your body will tell your tastebuds that it is just fine, trust me.

That's a pretty big assumption. In an urban or suburban environment like mine, food will be far more common than (uncontaminated) water in a major disaster. In a non-major disaster, you won't have to worry about food or water once you're past the response time of the local authorities.

In most of the scenarios that I've thought through, water will be the greater challenge. Plus, water is critical. You can go without food for quite a while, but dehydration kills much faster.

If you have a decent, reliable, continuous supply of fresh water, if you can count on it being uncontaminated in a survival situation (ie when everyone else affected starts using the water as well, not all intelligently), then sure. For me, and I suspect most of us here, water is the bigger issue.

Your body uses water to digest food. Metabolizing protein takes water, too. Salt dehydrates. For my part, I'd rather just keep more water in my kit. If it's a home kit, then sure, but then I'd use prepackaged foods that have a water content of their own. I like jerky, and I eat it on the trail, but it's not what I'd call a survival food.

Yep, that's why earlier in my post I stated that if I didn't have a reliable water supply, I wouldn't eat. All food consumed requires water to digest, so better to just minimize altogether than to be selective. I reckon my focus is more on wilderness survival, in places where I am pretty sure I can find the water I need, so the pemmican balls just make the most sense because they meet more of my criteria than any other food (energy to weight, shelf life, easy to make, historical success rate). I would reckon, as you put it, that urban environments do have a somewhat reversed priority. I can certainly say that here in Baghdad I am far more concerned about where my next drink of water comes from than what is there to eat on.

That said, I would reiterate the point I was making was that the best way I can think to store meat for survival food is the way the pre-industrial age nomads of North America did it, which was larded meat, or more preferably Pemmican. Until they can make a portable gadget that will keep fresh food fresh and sterile, this is about as good as it gets.

I would like to thank all you for contributing your ideas into makeing preserved meat. I might just get dehydrator and learn to make jerky meat. It is suitable for just 1week food. I want to have other types of food for backup