Preserve Meat Without Refrigeration FOREVER with only 1 Ingredient! | Historical Salt Cured Meat

Hello everyone, welcome back today. I'm so excited to share with you how you can

preserve

meat

forever

with just one

ingredient

. The

only

thing you need for your

meat

to be stable and keep for eternity is a little good quality

salt

. New concept: We can trace the use of

salt

as a preservation method back to ancient civilizations such as Rome and Egypt. Now, with the advent of

refrigeration

and freezers, this has fallen out of favor and is almost becoming a lost art. As? Does this really work? When we salt meat, it draws out moisture creating a hospitable environment for bad bacteria like listeria and creating a hospitable environment for salt-loving bacteria.

These bacteria come in and create lactic acid. The lactic acid then in turn changes the taste makes it even more delicious and promotes good molds like penicillin and I know mold on food might sound a little scary but it goes back centuries and centuries it's very traditional and good for you, there are

only

three things we need to get started. I need our good quality meat, a container of some kind to cure it with some pure salt. You want to verify that your salt is just one

ingredient

, that's the really important part here. Your salt should only be salt if you check the back of the container. of salt, you may be surprised that there are often two or three more ingredients than salt, many times, that is to help it not clump so it is more pourable, sometimes the salts are fortified to have additional minerals , but we don't want that in our meat, so make sure you get pure salt, which can be sea salt.

Himalayan Pink Salt Cellular Fat, there are many different salts, but make sure it is pure salt. I like to get mine from Azure standard, they have good prices on bulk salt. I usually buy a 25 pound bag and then I'm good to go for about a year, so I have a small one here and I put a little bit of pepper in it. Totally optional, not necessary, but delicious. Now I'm going to show you in this larger cut how to do the same thing. This is a very thick piece of pork belly and it still has all the fat in it, so it will definitely give us a different product, the small and thin one.

Well they are both going to be equally delicious and we use the exact same method to cure both pieces of meat, that's why it's called the salt box method and the theory is that whatever sticks to the surface of the meat is enough to cure it. . There are a lot of recipes now that are very technical and they get really overwhelming and daunting because you have to weigh things down to the gram and they require healing salts and all these additives and extra things and if you think about it like I said before, this is a very old preservation method. and time tested and I highly doubt the ancient Egyptians and Romans were sitting there with their digital scales weighing everything accurately in grams, so I like the Saltbox method, so far it hasn't been a failure for me as far as the whole muscle. muscle cures, here we go, we put a nice little coating of salt on it and that's all it takes to make this beautiful piece of pork stable for now until all eternity, we'll put it in the tub of this bus now that I have a bus. tub, so this is what I'm going to use, but if you don't have one, don't feel like you need to go without buying one, you can use the crisper drawer in your refrigerator and that will work just as well.

I can put it on um like I have it on a little cooling rack here, just a cheap little cooling rack to keep it out of the brine because as the salt does it, it's a job it's going to draw out all the moisture properly and that's point. In some cures we want it to settle in the brine and have that osmosis like with a ham. When you brine something, it sucks the salt water into itself so it can penetrate deeply through a thicker cut of meat like a ham or a tenderloin. In those situations we would want osmosis, but in this one, for a thicker piece of meat flat and thin, like a pork belly or maybe a thinner cut of meat, we don't really want that because it will get too salty, so either put it on a small tray so it can drain and not sit in the liquid or Be very studious when emptying this container once or twice a day.

We will let them sit in a cool place for about five days or until they are no longer seeing liquid coming out, so you may have to put up with a very large piece of meat for eight or nine days and if you forget them in the refrigerator for eight nine ten days, nothing bad will happen to them, so minimum five days until A week or two when you get to them and then we will return for the next step, welcome everyone. It's actually been 10 days since our last segment and if I seem a little off today, I'm pretty sick, which is why it's been so long and in between, so there's no harm in going over a little bit of what I mentioned before. , it is quite flexible and I would have liked to come back in five days to continue this process, but 10 days later there will be nothing wrong with that. so let's go ahead and continue, we have our meat that's been sitting out, we just salt it and then set it aside to let all that moisture out and you'll notice that when you come back for the meat after it has sat, it will be really cooked. rigid, right, it doesn't move anymore, it's pretty firm, solid, so you'll be able to tell that if it's still very, very flexible and very, very moist, I think it's pretty dry to the touch, those would be signs that something is maybe I miss you.

You may want to add a little more salt and then let it continue draining if you still see liquid in your container and you have soft meat, so even this large piece is very stiff and now very solid, so for the Next step is to rinse them and then pat them dry and rinse them just to remove excess salt and spices. This time we don't use any spices, but just to make sure we have big lumps of salt. It may still be stuck to the surface as they would add ugly and not very nice spots later on and then you'd just want to use some kind of non-peeling towel, a tea towel or like if you were using a cloth napkin, something you're not going to get lint all over the meat but just to remove the excess moisture now all that's left to do is hang this up you can use a little metal hook something like this is really nice and convenient or if you haven't already you want to invest in these you can use some butcher's twine so you'll use butcher's twine.

Take a knife, make a small hole in the corner and pass the thread through there. This time I'm going to go ahead and use. my hook and I'm just going to put it in the middle here they also make multi-time ones for larger pieces like this, but a little more expensive I haven't bought one yet so that'll do just one hook like that. I'm going to hang this somewhere cool and dark for five days before I start slicing it and frying it like bacon or if you want to eat it raw like a prosciutto or something, you'd have to weigh it right now and then wait.

Lose 30 percent of your body weight before you start eating it raw, but this is going to be like bacon. I'll hang it for five days and then I'll start slicing it and frying it and okay, we're at the end, the best step. It's ready to eat It's been hanging for 10 days Now we can cut it and fry it and enjoy the foreign homemade bacon. We have our thick and thin pieces here and I'll show you some of the differences that you can see. Now at this point in Cure, we're going to cook it a little bit so that on our biggest, thickest piece of meat here you can see a little bit of mold, maybe it's very small, but it might be turning a little bit white. penicillin on our thinnest piece that we

cured

, you'll see a little bit of salt crust, this kind of shiny crystallized patch here is where the salt built up a little bit hard and it's called a scab.

You can see a little bit right here. also a little salt crust and that's not the end of the world, that just means there was more salt than the meat needed and that's why it rejected it a little and it just forms a little scalp to Remedy this if you use

cured

meat with single ingredient salt and it's too salty because most of us beginners tend to be oversalted rather than undersalted because we're worried about bacterial growth, so if it gets too salty and has some salt . scabs, don't worry, what you will do is cut the meat into one piece that you are going to use or into many slices, however you plan to use it, cut it from the main piece and put it in a plate with water. for an hour before using it and that will help get some of that extra salt out and it won't be too salty anymore, but you can also use it and leave the salt out of the rest of your dish and your bacon will perform. as your salting agent, that's amazing, like a pot of beans, super delicious, okay, let's cut a couple of these and fry them right now, it's not so bad to cut them the longer you let it dry, hang the dryer, that's how will put It will never go bad, but it will eventually become rock solid and at that point, what is traditionally common is that you then grate it like parmesan on top of dishes just to give it that extra flavor.

This is a fun surprise because I didn't know what was inside. of all this muscle before curing it, look how much marbling, there is actually a lot of fat content in this little piece of rib flush with the belly, so it will be much more tender and moist than I anticipated, so we have a real fatty bacon from that thin piece and we have a very meaty lean bacon from our thicker cup, let's fry them. You can see that by reducing them right away, the fatty pieces cook much faster than the lean ones, so the ones that were a little bit fattier are definitely a little bit more brittle so that the fat is lost and they become incredibly tender and crumbly.

These will be a little more appetizing, they are meaty but so delicious they are really thick and filling. bacon, let's try the thick cut first mm-hmm, okay, it's super delicious, it has a little more teeth, it's almost like a ham has a lot more fiber than the packaged bacon we're used to, so it's more this is how a cross between ham and bacon, you have more muscle fiber you can really taste the salty, crispy perfection, the thinner pieces that burned more fat will be more of what we're used to, where they're really crispy. not much muscle fiber, you feel where they just crunch and melt, thank you, very crunchy, not much muscle fiber feel, very good, none of these were too salty.

I was a little worried about the thinner piece with the salt coming out too salty, but it really wasn't, even if you have some salt crusts, give it a try, first fry a test piece and then decide if you need to soak it to get rid of that. extra salt. That's it, just like that with just one ingredient you can

preserve

any piece of whole muscle meat indefinitely. I hope you liked it and let me know in the comments if you want more videos like this or if you've tried it, thanks for watching. Guys, if you enjoyed this video, I think you'll really like this one, check it out below, keep it cool.