Putting Stuff Up

For many reasons, bugging in is much more likely for me. I could use MREs and freeze drieds, but that gets pricy fast. Does anyone here know how to put up cheese and meat? (Other than jerky- I know how to make that.)

I'm hoping to have meat and cheese along with canned vegitables and fruits, but I can't find them around here.

Has anyone waxed hard cheeses, or know anything about long term unrefridgerated storage of waxed cheese?

Home canning of meat is easy - jars & lids, a pressure cooker, and follow instructions carefully.

No idea about cheese; sorry. I suspect that hard cheeses will store pretty good in a dark cool place. A matter of taste, but some cheeses improve with age - cheddar comes to mind. Shouldn't be too hard to find some info.

Oh - you didn't ask, but eggs are easy. We have kept eggs for many, many months without a simgle problem. Buy fresh eggs, coat each one with shortening, put back in the carton, and store in a cool dry place. I guess folks used to use lard and layer them instraw in a barrel, but I would think that lard has some chance of going rancid easier than vegetable shortening. Obviously, inspect each egg as you coat it and set any cracked ones aside for either immediate consumption or discard.

Tom

Know of any way to safely can meat without a pressure cooker?

I've heard of that trick with eggs, but instead of shortening, using parafin -- which won't go rancid. I would imagine beeswax would work just as well to if you already had an apiary. And then otherwise its standard pantry storage (cool, dry, dark, etc.. ) and they'll last at least a year or so. Probably also good to develop that habit of cracking them individually in a small bowl first and then adding to what you're preparing just incase you hit a bad one, so you don't ruin the whole batch.

Lily, welcome to the forum!

for canning.... the only way is with a pressure cooker.... a water bath canner does not get hot enough to kill the bacteria.

Hi Lily. Welcome onboard!

Anyone have any thoughts or heard about about how the increase in the number of internally Salmonella-infected eggs has affected their long-term egg storing routines? (If this is news to you, here's one link on the subject).

It's still not that common, but increasingly, just making sure that eggs are clean and intact isn't enough to avoid the infected eggs. By storing them for months at a relatively warm temperature, I imagine that the concentration of Salmonella inside these eggs will grow quite large by the time it is consumed. I wonder if you could tell the egg is crawling with billions of Salmonella bacteria when you finally crack it (nice tip about using a bowl--I always do that). Probably not, in which case, better cook them well, I would say.

Ahhhh, the miracles of our industrial food industry... <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

OK, so "water bath + beef = botulism" is a pretty global thing.

What if I was to do it in something with a high acid content, like tomato sauce? Maybe do chicken in a nice marinera... add a vaccume bag with a nice pasta, and a small waxed cheese...

Just becuase it's an emergency doesn't mean you can't eat right during a bug in. :P

C'mon - pressure cookers are not all that expensive and they have other uses.

FWIW... I truly believe all the pubs about using a pressure cooker to reach a sterilizing temperature, but...

I suspect that if one was scrupulous about sanitation and hygene, it PROBABLY could be done at boiling-water temps. Meat is pretty much cooked at 165 deg F and WATERBORNE disease organisms are toast at or below boiling (nominal 212 DegF for the C crowd). I would not care to be the test subject for that, but it's something to wonder about.

Get a used pressure cooker at a yard sale and go buy a new gasket for it. Probably cost about what the scrap metal value is. The most versitile ones are stainless steel, and new, they cost more than the aluminum ones. Aluminum ones cook better if you're not using it as a pressure cooker - just keep the highg-acid stuff out of it (usual precaution).

HTH

Tom

Hi Tom,

The problem with non-pressurized canning of meats it fails to actually sterilize the meat. Heating/cooking the meat work is okay for non-canning mechanisms of food preservation, but if you are canning the contents, it must be sterile. While most bacterial/fungal organisms are readily killed at cooking temperatures, organisms such as many Bacillus species and Clostridium species (spore-forming organisms) are not, unless you use both high temperatures and pressure, these bacteria will not be killed. As a number of them are either facilitative-anaerobes (can grow with or without O2) or obligate anaerobes (no O2) and a sealed can is lacking O2, these organisms can thrive. Clostridium botulium the cause of botulism is just once such organism. Other Bacillus sp. can also cause food poisoning.

Pete

Could you please clarify what you mean by "fresh eggs"? Is that farm fresh eggs, straight from the chicken, never washed, etc? Or will eggs "fresh" from the grocery store work as well?

A friend with chickens told me that she keeps her freshly laid eggs on her kitchen counter for months, and she doesn't coat them with lard, wax, or anything else.

When eggs go on sale, I've been storing them by freezing them, but a new method that doesn't take up space in my freezer would be great.

-Kuovonne

Pete,

Gee, even I understood that explanation - thanks! Like I wrote, I follow the published guidelines on canning...

Tom

Kuovonne,

Grocery Store Eggs. You could use the other "raw" hen fruit, I'm sure, but I rarely have access to farm eggs these days so I have not done that. I suspect that fertilized eggs may be a little more perishable, but that's only a guess.

The coating on the eggs reduces oxygen transport and retards evaporation - that's all. The Crisco treatment is so cheap, easy, fast, and effective that I'm not interested in experimenting with parafin. OTOH, I bet that plain petrolateum jelly (unscented etc) would do equally well, although perhaps a tic more in cost.

Never had any problems with Crisco going rancid - heck, most everyone keeps vegetable shortening in the cupboard anyway, right? Lard varies in it's susceptability to going rancid.

I greatly prefer this method to freezing. Eggs are cheap enough - try a few dozen this way and see what you think.

Regards,

Tom

Ironraven,

I should have remembered this before: You can pickle beef (a.k.a corned beef) and pork (salt pork - the staple of sailors for centuries). And of course, a "real" ham keeps very well. Dry sausages properly prepared can keep well - I've kept some as long as 1 year in the cool room. AFAIK, these are too much work for a modern d.i.y. person and the grocery store stuff - or even deli stuff - is not in condition to keep when you buy it. There are plenty of instructions around for doing these things.

Then there's the old slaughter-a-hog-and-put-it-up-for-the-winter method of cooking the meat, putting a layer in a barrel, covering it with liquified lard, add a layer of cooked pork and cover with lard, etc. This is where the expression "scraping the bottom of the barrel" comes from - by the time you eat your way to the bottom of the pork barrel, it can be a little rancid. I guess scrapple is sort of a smaller scale version of this. Meat has to be sizzling and lard hot when each layer goes in the barrel.

And since I was on the subject of pickling... pickled cabbage (saurkraut) used to be considered anti-scurvy, meaning to me that it retained vitamin C content. Homemade is not hard to do - crockery pot, strong brine, sink a layer of chopped cabbage with a plate or clean bit of crockery/stone, repeat until full. Smells to high heaven and it's best to skim the scum off the top before fishing a layer of 'kraut out for consumption. OTOH, it tastes so different than store-bought (better, to my taste), it may as well be a different dish. I remember my great-grandpa and my dad making 'kraut. Now, I dunno about the Vitamin C - all I know is that some old accounts claimed that eating some 'kraut everyday prevented scurvy. Kimschee might be better if you like that (and eating enough of that will ward of the average American from your presence <grin>).

Tom

Thanks!

I'll try this as soon as I'm done with the eggs in my fridge.

-Kuovonne

I was told that eggs to be stored must never have been refrigerated. If fresh (never refrigerated) they will keep well. The variety of coating methods keep the air from penetrating the shell.

Can anyone verify the no refrigeration story??

When canning my pork terrine, I don't use a pressure cooker.
I just follow the rules in my canning book and use a longer boiling time.

Industrialy canned food can be kept forever : but the taste of the product is not guaranted after too long a time (see date stamp on box) .
Home canning is supposed to have a much shorter shelf time (6 months - 1 year)

Probably more that you want to know can be found at the National Center For Home Food Preservation:

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/

Under Publications you will find the " USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning".

about cheese :

why don't you make it yourself ?
just keep powdered milk and and ferment (AFAIK, ferment shelf life is one year - more if freezed).
I prefer making mine with fresh milk, but I guess I will have to try some with powdered milk, just to taste it ; I guess it wont be as good as with fresh milk, but it will be cheese anyway...
And if you make "hard" cheese like "tome de Savoie", anyway you need a few months to let it grow (?).

i'm so glad cheese stays good for quite a while. i could live off of good cheese, crackers, and wine for at least a couple of months. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> speaking of wine, has anyone ever made their own? my grandfather in europe still does. funny, he stores it in used 1liter soda bottles. i must say, its quite good.
a lilttle off topic but still relevant. as far as food storage goes, is there any resource to find out what foods submarine crews used to pack for long trips out to sea years ago? i would think that would be a good source to find out about food preparation and even creative recipies with limited supplies. its just a thought.

We toured an old deisel sub (in Portland Oregon) a few years ago and they told us about life aboard the boat....They had LOTS of canned food, bags of rice, potatoes......the usual staples......one thing we did find funny was that they would load the canned goods and make a floor out of them and walk on top of them. As they used them (consumed the contents) they had more (head) room to walk. But they didn't carry anything "special".

Some very valid points concerning canning and/or the preservation of food has been raised in earlier responses to the original post. I grew up in a time when everyone, well – everyone I knew – canned food. They put up veggies and made pickles and kraut. It was such a common household practice that contests were held at the local county fair on the items which were canned. Probably still are in some parts of the USA today. There was a smattering of sausage makers who smoked their own (back when that phrase meant exactly that). Just last weekend my wife and I put up 50 pints of strawberry jam. Blackberrys will be ripening soon and we are eager to find a supply of green (i.e., not ripe) sand pears to put up another years supply of pear relish. But putting up meat just scares the bejeebers out of me.

So I did a little Google search on all the words “canning preservation mormon” which returned approx 12,700 hits in English. I have known for years that the Mormons have a recommended practice of having a quantity of food stored for emergencies and hard times. I have also read news articles about the canneries in their churches for the benefit of the members. Two links I found interesting are:

www.survival-center.com/foodfaq/ff17-equ.htm

http://athagan.members.atlantic.net/PFSFAQ/PFSFAQ-7.html

The first link is very simple. The second link is a resource listing regarding food stock preservation. Perhaps everything and more than you ever wanted to know about canning and food preservation can be found here. On of these links is to a site for Ball (an old name in home canning products). It speaks directly of why low acid foods, such as meats must be prepared using the water bath pressure cooker method. It is an interesting read. After reading the info, I think I will just buy commercially canned meats.

good information. thanks for the links. didn' t know mormons encouraged planning for crisis (food wise). very informative.

Just want to reiterate, if you are canning a low acid food( just about anything except tomatoes I think) YOU MUST USE A PRESSURE CANNER! As someone said before 212deg will kill anything EXCEPT botulism which will kill you. Also a pressure canner and cooker are two different beasts, I think one is just larger though. If you are really intrested some areas have clubs/facilites to can stuff, call your cooperative extension they will likely know.