Posted by zog
on August 7, 2009, 5:22 pm, in reply to "Re: Food/ Pemmican"
I did an entire rather large holstein bull calf once, fresh born, maybe...hmm..120 lbs or so. Filleted and stripped it and dried it, total boneless, all of it. This will give a rough ratio to figure the weight and volume of an entire beefer say at 1200 lbs, ten times that. Each jar (see next) only had a few lbs weight in it, not even as heavy as it was filled with the juice.
The entire thing after drying fit in six one gallon juice jars with plenty of air space left over. (dried in racks over my woodstove with a low fire ticking over)(the momma rolled on it and killed it, that's how I got it). It lasted two years on the shelf until it was all gone. A few pieces that were cut too thick rotted on the inside, that's it. Thin seems to be the operative word there. Anything over a quarter inch thick was too thick. East coast (maine) summer time, normally humid. It very rarely if ever gets as dry as the high desert on the east coast, at least I never have seen it or recall that, even in the winter.
Right now, just today, 1/2 hour ago, was out shoveling around the edges of the garden to keep the creepy grass weeds out. 45 seconds is enough to start sweating (3 shovel fulls say), five minutes is enough to completely soak my shirt through, entirely. And this is just kinda sorta humid today, it gets worse. I do around 45 minutes work, then 20 minutes cool down shade and drink liquids in this sort of heat this time of year. Riding any of the tractors (doing whatever..) with a roof/shade though I can do a few hours between breaks, but hand labor..not so much, heh.
Hmmm, of course I wonder now if you could (at home, never tried it) dry ice freeze the strips and chunks, then run them through a large home made vacuum container, dry them that way, then grind and packager them. The fancy camping stores sell expensive freeze dried food, it can't be *that* hard to do it yourself.
Basically large scale on the east coast the traditional way to put away meat with both indians and the settlers is the smokehouse and also just salting, salt cured. Keeps the bugs off, keeps the dogs and coyotes and so on off off and just works.
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