How much salt to preserve a steak?

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Situation: Two people are traveling through the woods. They come across an elk and kill it. They carve it up into steaks, cook and eat one immediately, and want to save the others for a couple of days while they travel through the woods. They have two horses but very little in the way of supplies.

How much salt would it take to preserve the steaks for a couple of days? Just enough to help ward off bugs and prevent rot. Or is this even a concern, if they're going to eat the rest of the meat in the next couple of days? They're not carrying, like, an entire elk haunch with them, just a few pounds of meat they were able to stuff into a pouch. Or would it keep better if they did carry a whole haunch?

They're travelling through deciduous forest in late summer. It's pretty warm most days, not terribly humid.

 

[Fnord]

Well even salting meat still requires a drying process and needs special storage (usually in barrels) to preserve it properly, especially if it's salted in warm weather. Salt itself in medieval times was pretty hard to come by, so it wasn't just thrown about willy-nilly on any old slab of meat. If the people are traveling, their best bet is to smoke the meat instead (though this also takes some time). Without any preservation techniques, the meat will turn pretty quickly in warm weather. Though in the past it is entirely possible that the human gut was more resistant to the bacteria that formed. Either way, it would be really hard to prep a large amount of meat on the move. Most of it would likely just go to waste.

 

[gavintonks]

you would hang the meat for 3 days as the enzymes make it tender.. If you have a very hot period nothing will last they would need to cook everything. Salting is pickling so you would need jars of brine.

Wrapping the meat and putting it in a cool dark place I would say 3 days, then the this day if they cook it all they could extend this for another 2 to 3 days

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Sounds like they wouldn't really be able to preserve the meat at all, as they're constantly on the move and don't have time to deal with hanging it up for long periods of time, or smoking

So I guess the best they could probably do is cook a few of the steaks at once, and eat them within the next day or two before they go bad. It's not that big a deal; they can hunt more if they need to. I guess the salt can just be used for seasoning Thanks!

 

[Butterfly]

I live in an old house built in the late 1800s or early 1900s. It has a pantry, and at the back of it a stone slab - called a cold stone. It was used before refrigeration to keep such things as milk, cheese, and meat fresh for longer periods, I assume it was especially useful during the summer. Never used it myself though.

I don't know which are which, but apparently different stones hold heat / cold for longer periods than others. I'm thinking along the lines of a slate slab or something like that. If your characters have a wagon, perhaps it is possible that they could be carrying a similar stone with them, but smaller and would have to be kept out of the sun by something, or, they could easily find a suitable rock that has sat in a cave / under a tree and not absorbed much heat from the sun and kept out at night to cool down.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

If your characters have a wagon, perhaps it is possible that they could be carrying a similar stone with them, but smaller and would have to be kept out of the sun by something, or, they could easily find a suitable rock that has sat in a cave / under a tree and not absorbed much heat from the sun and kept out at night to cool down.

Alas, no. The two of them flee from a siege in the middle of the night, with only a pair of horses and minimal supplies. They're also staying off the roads, for fear of pursuit.

 

[Ravana]

Yeah, I'd say that for a couple of days, they'll be okay. Keeping it wrapped in something should keep insects off, and it won't go bad in such a short time–in fact, game is often hung out with no processing whatsoever for a few days to let it become "gamy," a flavor characteristic some find desirable.

The notion of carrying a joint rather than steaks is also a good one: the cut surface will deteriorate fastest, and they can always just slice that away before carving the meat for that day's meal. Cooking the meat prior to packing it up will probably not add more than a couple days to its lifespan, though it would help kill microbes already present. If they can't take the time to cure it properly, the meat would pretty much have to be packed in salt to make a significant difference… and that is more salt than most people are likely to be carrying about, unless they're specifically expecting to have to carry something back in it (say, a fugitive's head).

As mentioned, external conditions, temperature and humidity in particular, will have strong effects on decay processes.

Believe it or not, honey will act as efficiently as a preservative as salt will–it has actually been used as an embalming agent at several points in history–though, again, you'd need enough to completely coat all the surfaces of the meat for the full effect, and this too requires more of the substance than is usually carted about by the average traveler on horseback. Honey is purported to be the only human-edible food product that can be stored indefinitely: it cannot go bad. If exposed to prolonged humid conditions, it will eventually ferment: it will absorb water from the atmosphere until sufficiently diluted for fermentation to begin (the absorption of water from the meat is the main factor in preservation for both honey and salt… which also means that you'd never want to pack meat in plain water). Barring that, it will remain edible literally forever. As far as we can tell, at least: we haven't found any more than a couple thousand years old yet.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Awesome info, thanks. It's not really a major problem for the characters either way; just something a reader pointed out, wondering whether they'd really be carrying enough salt to preserve it. But the trick with the haunch probably would work best for how they're travelling.