Haven’t quite gone to bed yet! This is interesting to me, as I have read old cookbooks that indicate that meat should/could be hanged for days or weeks before use! That some meat was considered a delicacy when it had actually rotted a little?!!!! Did people just have stronger intestines then, or maybe they just lived shorter lives!....
Buy a cooler and get some ice.
...old cookbooks that indicate that meat should/could be hanged for days or weeks before use! That some meat was considered a delicacy when it had actually rotted a little?!!!!
*************************************
Ever watch the Travel channel programs “Bizarre Food with Andrew Zimmern”? Goes all over the world and shows how people obtain and prepare their food. ...A few nights ago he did a show about NYC and one piece was in the meat market that processes about 1 million pounds per year to supply restaurants everywhere.
After trimming sides of beef, they put some of the portions in a drying room, just wrapped in plastic and not frozen, where they age for 2-3 weeks. The bacteria breaks down the meat and tenderizes it. ....Andrew and the boss of the place were just cutting thin slices off and eating them raw.
Fish and wild game are also air dried in cool climates (not the tropics). ......Wouldn’t work here in Texas!
Interesting thread you started!
This describes several specific bacteria that are not the “friendly” kind, in regard to raw meat storage:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/shared/PDF/How_Temperatures_Affect_Food.pdf
That is what aged beef is and until it actually spoils the more aged it is the better the flavor and the more tender. To properly age beef you need a place to hang it that has really cold constant temperature at near freezing but not quite. Properly aging and storage can be a little different.
We stored it without a real meat cooler room though when I was growing up. You can’t just hang it anywhere though, you have to have a cold place to hang it. We only dealt with a quarter at a time, when we butchered the meat was shared between 4 families. We hung it on a screen porch at night and it would be really chilled by early morning. By sunup we wrapped it in a tarp and put it under the bed in the coolest bedroom. We only heated the main part of the house, so bedrooms were pretty cool. We only cut off what we were cooking for supper, we didn’t unwrap the tarp during the day. The smaller you cut meat the quicker it spoils, so if we wanted hamburger we ground it just for that meal. We did not butcher in the summer because we could not get it chilled enough at night. If the temperature was warmer than normal for a couple days in the winter my mom would bone the meat and cook it so it would not spoil.
Sounds like a pain but it is a routine like a lot of other things and when you get used to doing it, not hard.
Aging hanging meat changes the texture (makes it easier to cut). I have only heard of hanging meat outside or in a barn during winter.
My dog is a champ at this: kills a rabbit and buries it, digs it up before it turns and eats like a king. She has about 3 in her ‘fridge’ atm.
Anyways, have you thought about curing/smoking? I like to pepper cure lean cuts of meat. My gf will not partake, but I can keep it well above 45 with no gastronomical problems for a few days. (only venison and beef, no pork or poultry)