Famous Pirate Ronald Jerky Post (archive relic)

Sun Sep 30, 2007 10:31 pm Re: jerky

Jerky comes in a great variety of seasonings. There is a place here that serves quite a variety made fresh and soft and tender, but it is not true jerky as the higher moisture content also makes it require refrigeration and have a shorter shelf life and they do tell the customers that and that it is perishable.

Some of the seasoning ingredients such as salt and sugar or honey are functional in preserving the meat to last as food for trips and adventures, but even at best it is not a storage food and is still somewhat perishable. Other seasonings are for flavor and variety. Smoke is often used and it helps to preserve, but mainly it is dryness and osmotic pressure with salt and or sugar that retards the growth of microbes.

I have made various kinds of jerky. The sugar can do as much to be a preservative as the salt. It is hard to eat much if it is salted too much, so I use a lot of brown sugar. I combined sauces for flavor and the sauces also add sugar. I soaked the dried meat in teriyaki sauce and that added plenty of salt with the flavor I desired. Then I dried it again which also concentrated the salt and sugar with very little moisture content which is a combination for it to last long or as longas jerky can be trusted to last which should be just for a trip and prepared just before.

When smoke was used by Indians for drying meat, very lean meat was cut very thin and draped over a cool smoky fire. The smoke does a little and it does add the smoky flavor, but it's greatest purpose was to keep the flies away from the meat.

The most effective part of preserving the jerky meat for a time is drying. Meat should also be cooked as the drying temperatures or if smoked those temperatures are not sufficient to kill parasites. Drying is the removal of moisture and without moisture microbes of spoilageare much less active.

Jerky lasts the longest when all of the three dryness, sugar and salt are combined. Still the jerky should only be trusted to last for a trip or excursion and should be consumed and should not be storage food.

The Indians made their jerky last longer and at the same time become a more complete food and of particularly high energy for the trail or to sustain them through battles by making it into pemmican. They would dry the jerky to remove all of the moisture content and pulverize it by pounding it on a buffalo skin with rocks to make it into a powder. To that they mixed in hot melted fat and dried berries and sewed it into askin.

It rings very true to me with my studies of nutrition and my personal tests of bicycle racing foods that this would be a particularly high energy food. Carbohydrates should be consumed for bicycle racing, but the pemmican is a very sustaining food. I experimented with it by chopping up beef jerky and mixing it with dried cherries from the health food store and drizzling it with hot coconut oil. Both coconut oil and palm oil are my choice of healthful oils. They are tropical oils which we can find or trade for with the locals of tropical placeswe visit as Neo-Swashbucklers. The pemmican I made was very tasty and didn't last long before I ate it all. It was a great snack and just a little was satisfying for replacing lunch when I was very busy at work,so I can see it served the Indians well when traveling light and far under adverse and strenuous conditions.

To make meats storage food, I pressure can them in canning jars with apressure cooker. Then meats last easily for years. I have quite a variety stored this way and will use caning jars again and again and have my pressure canners with me as very important preparedness supplies.