Thread: Biltong. Preserving Meat Without Refrigeration.

@Bol Tackshin It wouldn't be the rancidity of pork that would worry me as much as the possibility of trichinosis.... although I'd imagine the parasites would have a hard job surviving all that salt and dehydration. I would be nervous about eating traditional cured raw ham for that reason, but I suppose if it was a real problem people wouldn't do it as they have done for decades. I'm probably over-cautious about such things. I tried making Droë Wors maybe fifteen years ago, but it did not impress me. I can't recall what meat I used now, but I was getting a lot of goats around that time. Venison and beef seem like the best choices to me.
@Bill999 Mincing certainly helps to make tough meat more useful, although I would personally be cautious about doing it to make a tramping snack. Mincing increases the surface area of the meat on which bacteria can sit and breed which might be hard to manage in a home-drying situation unless the meat was cooked. Then again, it should dry quickly and I'm just spouting my cautious opinion. I have a hand-powered mincer, but I have been considering getting something with a motor.

I got a big wild sow recently. It looked like it was fairly old. However it was the fattest wild pig I have ever seen or heard of. So I had to keep the meat. We've made two meals from it so far. The first was a stir-fry using a thinly sliced undercut steak. It was delicious, but chewy. So then I slow-cooked a casserole. That tasted wonderful too, but it still required a decent bite to get through the meat. So mincing to make things like patties and meat-loaf may be the answer.

Here is the pig. I shot it with my .223. I could not lift it off the ground. I was thinking about dragging the carcass maybe half a kilometre back to my wagon, but it was too big... so I had to cut it up. It was covered with dirt so I had a big clean up and trim job when I got home. I let the meat hang in the garage overnight before processing it. I would have liked to have hung it longer, but it was dirty and I took comfort from the thought of all the pigs I've processed and frozen straight away that were still tender enough.



Here are the backsteaks in a bowl:



I rendered the trimmings to collect the lard:



I boiled some of the bones and scraps to make stock. I froze this in stainless cups and later transferred the stock to a heavy plastic bag. I've come to believe that stock can help to make some very good casseroles and soups:



And I am curing some to create bacon. It is nearly ready. I probably won't smoke this, but I may rig something up with my barbeque to do the job. I believe that if I dried these slabs, they would keep without being refrigerated. I don't know whether or not the fat would go rancid, and I doubt whether it would remain uneaten long enough to find out.