[Sca-cooks] Food Safety / Food Preservation question

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jul 11, 2006, at 8:03 PM, Daniel Myers wrote:

>
> Ok, so I've had this piece of uncooked venison sitting on the counter
> at room temperature for about a week ...
>
> It's (I hope) not as bad as it sounds.  I had a fresh deer roast
> handy on the same day I came across a reference to salting venison,
> so I thought, "What the heck," and practically buried it in salt.
> About 8 hours later I poured off the scary looking liquid that had
> accumulated in the pan and repacked it with fresh salt.
>
> The meat's lost a notable amount of volume, and has darkened in color
> a bit, but otherwise appears ok.  It doesn't smell bad at all (in
> fact, it smells better than raw venison usually does).
>
> So my question is this:  Is there any way of knowing if this stuff is
> safe to eat before I go to the trouble of boiling it to remove the
> salt and cooking it and risking making myself horribly ill?
>
> - Doc

It's _probably_ fine. My only caveat would be that your doctor and  
your insurance carrier would tell you you're crazy, and if you fed it  
to anyone else, your attorney would say the same, but the main area  
in which your technique differs from most tried-and-true methods  
where the meat really needed to be preserved, is that this isn't the  
period between November and January in the Northern hemisphere, and  
room temperature is generally considered a little high: generally you  
want around 50-60 degrees F.

Was this meat fresh when you started? I wonder about provenance when  
I hear about large chunks of fresh big game in July. Or by any chance  
is this a farmed product?

I ask because there are claims out there that meat that has been  
frozen behaves somewhat differently than fresh meat when salted. I  
see you say it's fresh, though. You might think about sticking a  
knife or skewer into the thickest part of it, withdrawing it, and  
smelling or tasting the part that went in. I'm not sure if a week is  
enough time for the salt to have penetrated through to the center,  
and it could get funky in the middle at room temperature.

I recall getting some amazingly pretty colors in the middle of a ham  
that had been improperly salted -- colors that would have been great  
in an oil painting or a science project, but didn't belong in meat.

Adamantius


"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04