Making it Last - Preserving Meat and Fish in the Wild
- BVABC Pro Staffer, Ryan Dotson
- Jun 27, 2016
- 5 min read
In a recent article I wrote about hunting, fishing and trapping in a survival situation. If you are lucky enough to score a large amount of food, you will have to preserve some of that meat or fish for later.
Especially in warm temperatures, eating meat that has not been preserved properly can make you very sick; however, it does not make sense to leave the extra meat behind to rot. I have found that learning how to preserve our food is as simple as looking back at what people did before refrigerators were available. Many times history is our best teacher for survival skills. In this article, I will cover a few different ways you can preserve meat to carry with you for days or even weeks.
First, let’s start with smoking the meat. This can really be done with any type of game meat or fish. The first thing I need to make clear… smoking is not cooking, it is drying. Set aside what you want to cook and eat immediately and then smoke the rest separately. You can air dry meat, but you run the risk of getting sick, and it could take several days to get a finished product. When smoking, the heat serves the purpose of drying the meat and the smoke kills the bacteria. Smoking meat also adds flavor which can be a nice morale booster when you are eating the same thing every day.
In order to successfully smoke meat you need to build a smoking rack. Start by assembling a tripod using green poles. The tripod should be at least five feet tall. Next, using cordage, string up the meat and hang it from the tripod. Another option for suspending the meat is to use green branches to build racks inside the tripod. Either way, the meat needs to be cut as thin as possible. I always cut it to less than ¼”. If you have salt or spices to season the meat, it will add flavor and help speed up the smoking process. Salt and spices help preserve the meat by dehydrating it further than smoke alone. Next, build a small fire. You can always add more wood later, but it’s tough to make a fire smaller once it’s too big. If you have a tarp or blanket to wrap around the top of the tripod, this will assist in the smoking process by trapping the smoke. The temperature at the point of the meat needs to stay between 100-225 degrees. As a rule of thumb, if you put your hand next to the meat and its hot enough that you have to pull it back, it is too hot. If your temps get too high and your meat cooks rather than drying out, it will develop bacteria or parasites and it will not be safe to eat. Therefore, you really need to monitor the fire throughout the process. If you want the meat to keep indefinitely like jerky, it is going to take at least eight hours. By looking for any moisture, you can check how done the meat is. It is finished when you can break it by bending, but it does not pull completely apart. It will be dryer than the jerky you buy at the store because there are no preservatives in the meat. If you only need to preserve it for a few days you can smoke it for half that time. In warm conditions it will last a few days, but in cold conditions it will last around a week. I followed this process a few weeks ago and it turned out great. The most challenging part was keeping the temperature in that ideal range. I frequently checked it with an oven thermometer, and keeping the temperature consistent was a chore to say the least.
My next favorite method to preserve meat is to build an evaporation refrigerator. You simply take a small container and place it inside a larger container. Clay pots work well, but anything will do. Fill the gap on the sides with sand and douse it with cool water. Then put your meat in the smaller container and cover just that container with a damp cloth to keep out bugs. Set this contraption in a sunny area where you can keep animals away. As the sun evaporates the water through the sand, it cools the inside container. You just have to be sure that you add water to the sand periodically so it doesn’t run out. Under the right conditions, this could keep your meat cold indefinitely.
There are a few other miscellaneous preservation methods. If it stays below freezing, you can put your meat in a sack and hang it in a tree at least 100 yards from your camp. It needs to be over 10 feet in the air to keep predators from snagging your meal. If it is cold enough, you probably have some ice in the area that you can add to the bag. I suggest that you put either the ice or the meat in an airtight container or bag before adding both to your larger hanging bag. This should keep the meat a few degrees colder than the air temperature. Curing the meat with salt is not as common, but is still very effective. You simply coat the meat in a thick layer of salt and hang it out in temperatures below 60 degrees. It will still need to be rinsed and cooked when you’re ready to eat. Finally, fish are effectively preserved as long as they are alive. Say you catch three fish and only want to eat one that day, you are still left with two fish to preserve. String them through the bottom lip and not the gills, and they can stay alive for hours. You would need to stringer them in running water if possible, and you would have to keep an eye out for predators looking for a free meal. Check periodically, and once they have stopped moving you only have a few more hours to gut them and cook or preserve them. Fish heads in particular can be wrapped, buried, and eaten the next day as long as they are cooked well. Burying meat eliminates the oxygen and high temperatures needed for bacteria to thrive, but it is a very temporary solution. I would not suggest keeping meat buried for more than a day or two. As you can see, there are many ways to extend the shelf life of your latest catch.
I am often asked what parts of animals can be eaten. On mammals you can eat the flesh, liver, heart, tongue, bone marrow, and eyeballs. Since many animals carry neurological diseases you should never eat any part of the nervous system, which means no brains or spinal column. You can boil the bones to flavor a soup and still get some extra nutrients that way. With fish, I don’t eat any of the internal organs. I normally eat the flesh and boil the bones and head for soup. As the head cooks you will be able to eat the delicate meat from the cheeks, and you can get to the eyeballs easier. Then drink the broth and take in all those wonderful fats and oils. With fish in particular, you lose a lot of the nutrients if you do not make broth out of the remains.
I know some of this sounds a bit gross, but it is not so bad when you have not eaten in a few days. Any parts you discard need to either be used for bait or disposed of far from camp, preferably in water so the smell does not attract animals. Remember, you do not know when your next meal will be.
Use as much of the animal as possible and try to ration anything you preserve. Your ability to make your food last may be the difference between life and death.
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