UnReal World > Suggestions

Fence as drying rack

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PALU:
If all you require is a single day with a clear sky you may pull it off if you were lucky enough to get the kill that morning. If you need 3 consecutive days I'd expect it to fail due to rain/overcast and humidity most of the time.

Dark Art:
*Shrug* All I know that on a good day you can make a few kilos of the stuff. You'll stink of raw meat, will have to clean the kitchen and have flies crawling all over you, but its perfectly doable. Like I said, I really dont know if the stuff would last for years, as I was too young to give much of a damn and ask my grandparents how to make it 100% and when I made it voluntarily it had to go only for a few weeks max, but guess I can ask my cousins. There isnt many of the elders left in the family, but I am sure someone would remember the "proper" way. The girls were in charge of collecting and packing the dried stuff, maybe they'd remember. But yeah, the grannies used this meat pretty much on regular basis and since it can be made reliably only during summer, the recipe they used had to be good enough to last, right?

JP_Finn:

--- Quote from: Dark Art on February 21, 2021, 01:18:35 AM ----snip- There isnt many of the elders left in the family, but I am sure someone would remember the "proper" way. The girls were in charge of collecting and packing the dried stuff, maybe they'd remember. But yeah, the grannies used this meat pretty much on regular basis and since it can be made reliably only during summer, the recipe they used had to be good enough to last, right?

--- End quote ---

That would be a great service to us, yourself and younger generations as well.
The drying method must be very different from the Finnish drying, where the cold and dry weather, slowly causes the moisture to evaporate to surrounding air. In summer with humidity pretty high, the moisture wouldn’t go anywhere.

Dark Art:
Heh, sure. I doubt that they'll tell me anything super secret since my own drying went rather well almost every time, but sure, I'll ask and see if any of them might remember something interesting.

Dark Art:
Well... I gotta thank you for putting me up to this. If nothing else, its been a few very interesting days, full of remembering a LOT of things and connecting with some folks I havent talked in quite some time:) All in all, I did learn the recipe and the way the meat was stored long term. Here is goes:

Beat up and roll out the strips of completely fat and any membrane free meat into 2.5-3 finger's wide strips and make them as thin as possible. Try not to rip them too much - the stuff gotta be placed as flat as possible on as wide as possible area. The best meats are those that are quite lean to begin with - chiken, beef, rabbit etc. Pork is not advisable. Perfectly doable, but you really gotta know what you are doing, otherwise it may not be safe.

So far nothing new to what I said earlier. One interesting thing that was mentioned several times is this - if grandma wasnt too sure about the weather's conditions, she used to soak a woolen mitten and place it in the morning on the rack. If it was completely dry by supper, the weather was good enough for drying meat.

The interesting part is how they stored it. Once the meat was dried (strips are completely dry, snap and crumble in your hand like a potato chips would), they'd crumble the strips into a fingernail size flakes, pack them into clay jars (something like this one - http://kod-ua.com.ua/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/%D0%93%D0%9B%D0%95%D0%A7%D0%98%D0%9A-3-%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0.jpg), leaving about two finger's space in on top of the jar. The empty space would be filled with dry hay, usually from rye, then sealed with about a finger's thick layer of tallow, covered with a cloth cap and then closed with the jar's lid. Aparently, this way the meat would sit in the earthen cellar as long as you'd like, but no one really remembered it being there for longer than about half a year. Probably would be ok longer, but everyone agreed that by mid spring, the meat that was prepared in the summer was gone, or just about gone.

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