Can You Preserve Meat Forever? Yes, With Just 1 Ingredient!

For centuries, people have been curing meat the old-fashioned way. But I’ve had no luck finding concise, easy-to-understand directions on how to safely preserve my own meat—until now. The one area I felt really insecure about was what to do with all the meat if we had absolutely no power.

The following video by A Pinch of Patience, has done us a kind favor by showing us how to preserve fresh or frozen meat that will become ‘forever’ shelf stable (without long-term refrigeration). This is using only ONE ingredient: pure salt. She has been doing this with the meat provided from their land, so she speaks from first hand experience, not just theory —which I appreciate.

The video should help many more of us to confidently go ahead and explore the world of home-cured meats.

Here’s the simple ‘salt box’ meat preservation method. She takes you all the way through salting to cutting your meat and cooking it —with a taste test at the end!

14 minutes.

Time Stamps:

00:00 – Intro
00:37 – How curing works
01:15 – What you need: fresh or frozen meat
01:30 – Salt
04:05 – Let the meat sit 5-10 days
07:15 – Rinse and pat dry
08:13 – Hang
09:45 – Enjoy
12:34 – Taste comparison

“Curing your own (fresh or frozen) meat is not only rewarding and delicious, but a great SHTF skill and a super-cool lost art.” ~A Pinch of Patience

Preserving meat with salt is known as curing. Curing not only contributes to preservation but also greatly influences flavor.

Experienced with curing her own family’s meat, our presenter answers people’s questions and makes it so easy to understand!

18 minutes.

Pioneers packed 10 pounds of salt per person for their six month journey along the Oregon trail. As a general guide, with 10 pounds of salt you can cure around 200 pounds of meat.

You can add any other seasoning you like, but salt’s the important part! I will probably be adding black pepper and smoked paprika.

The kinds of salt for preserving meat would include:

• Redmond’s Real Salt – unrefined and mined from an ancient seabed in Utah safe from modern pollutants

• Himalayan pink salt – a very trace mineral-rich unrefined salt

• Celtic Sea Salt (or ‘sel gris’ meaning grey salt) – hand raked and gathered from the western coast of France

Meat spoils because bacteria thrives there. Bacteria needs water, and there is a lot of water content in meat, especially the muscle fibers. It effectively draws any water out of the microbial cells through a process called osmosis. Using salt creates an environment where bacteria cannot develop and expand.

Researchers have confirmed that proper salt preservation eliminates the growth of botulism.

Various salted meats and fish have continued to be staple diet foods for N. America, Southern China, Holland, Scandinavia, Coastal Russia and the Arctic.

Meats that are classified as “hard dried” like jerky and biltong can last many years, as long as they are stored correctly. Dry conditions and the perfect crust of salt can do the job just fine. In theory, you could preserve the meat for decades, although most likely it would make the meat unpalatable.

4 Basic, Simple Steps To Preserving

Understanding how to preserve meat with salt in the wild is a top rated skill to master. Furthermore, it could be the difference between starving and keeping your family fed. Here is a simple 4 step process in dry curing your desired meat:

• Step 1: Rinse desired fresh meat in cold or lukewarm water (never use hot or boiling)

• Step 2: Pour thin layer of salt all over the meat and rub it in.

• Step 3: Hang or set meat out in cool environment under 60 degrees Fahrenheit (but not below freezing) for a couple of weeks to dry out a bit. (This post states “the meat should be in a cold environment (such as your fridge) while dry curing.” That is why people traditionally butchered in the fall as the weather grew cooler.

• Step 4: Before cooking the meat, rinse off the salt with water.

At the minimum, if you’re only using salt to preserve (and no other methods such as smoking), it’s generally considered that about a 20% salt concentration on the surface of the meat is enough to kill off most types of microbes and fungi that can spoil food quickly.

Vegetables can also be preserved by quick pickling with salt.

2 books for your further research:

“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” ~Genesis 9:3, NKJV

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