[Sca-cooks] Food Safety / Food Preservation question

[Stefan li Rous]

Adamantius commented:
<<< 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.

  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. >>>

Bingo! That last is the part that most concerns me, and I was  
wondering if that would occur to others.

How thick were these pieces of meat? They sound like they are  
probably okay, but did the salt penetrate throughout the meat or not?  
Sure, a fair amount of liquid was drawn out, but was that just from  
the surface layers.

I remember reading in one of the "history of salt" books that the sea  
salt from France, derived by evaporating sea water using the sun, was  
preferred in period to the salt from other locations which was  
obtained by boiling brine over fires, for salting meat and fish. The  
sea salt was often discolored and contained other impurities, and was  
cheaper, but it also had much larger crystals due to the slower  
evaporation rate from using the sun. The concern was that if you used  
finer salt crystals, the outside of the meat or fish would quickly be  
dehydrated and sealed, the brine created would not penetrate through  
to the inner layers and they would continue to putrefy inside the  
nicely sealed package.

One of the advantages of pickling over salting is probably the fact  
that the pickling liquid penetrates the meat easier. Similarly this  
is the reason that when you are drying meats you want them sliced as  
thinly as possible and you want to use lean meats.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****