having filled the freezer mostly full of meat, I have switched to meat preservation via methods other than the freezer.

What I landed on is called biltong. Biltong is just a dried meat similar to beef jerky but the process leaves a softer core and is cut thicker than your general purpose jerky. It is a South African thing. They have been doing this for thousands of years and it is thought of as highly as we think about jerky except they say it's better than jerky. We'll see. I just hope I don't food poison myself.

It consist of curing the meat with vinegar and salt at it's base. They usually use a wine vinegar and Worchester sauce and coarse grain sea salt. The curing time is anywhere from...put it on and hang the meat...to put the cure on and let it sit in the fridge(covered or in plastic bag) for 24-36 hours to anywhere in between. Depends on how much you like the vinegar taste as to how long you let it cure.

The spices consist of coriander seed(which, as it turns out, is cilantro or the seeds from cilantro) toasted and coarsely ground, Pepper corns mixed in and coarsely ground, pepper flakes if you like that kind of heat.

I've seen vids of peeps adding honey to the wet cure and any number of other spices to the dry mix to premixed biltong spices in a bottle.

Apply all this stuff to the meat and hang it. Some people use a biltong box made from differing materials and sophistication to just hanging it in an area of your house. The main purpose is to drive the water from the meat at a humidity level of 50-60 percent and a temperature of 70-80 degrees for a period of time ranging from 3-6 or 7 days...depending on if you want a "wet" or "dry" biltong. The main idea is to drive off 35-50 percent of the water in the meat by weight. So you weigh the meat at start, put that number on a tag and then you weigh it some number of days later until you get it to where you want it...based on experimentation it looks like.

Not entirely sure we could keep the house perfectly fly free and given that we know we get fruit flies from all the garden vegies this time of year, I built a biltong box from a plastic tote...hung it on a wall in the back bedroom and here we go. I let my wet cure set in the fridge for four hours and then put it in the box yesterday afternoon. I'll weigh a few pieces come Wednesday...see where it is.

Still haven't decided if this is a shelf stable thing or for how long or if it better to store it in the fridge or how long it lasts that way. Have one vid I've yet to study that is titled "use this method to get your biltong to last 5 years" or something similar. I don't think I care about getting it to last that long but I would like to to be shelf stable for a year or so.

Given how much The Woman and I like jerky I don't think there's a chance in hell anything that resembles jerky will last very long at all.

I topped the freeze off with 1.29 per pound Boston butt. Ground to burger. It hurt down to my core not to be able to process another 100 pounds of that but the freeze will only hold what the freeze will hold. Turns out we are liking the ground butt as a beef replacement. Tasty stuff and the sausage is particularly good.

Just some thoughts on how I'm prepping for the supposed food shortages to come or not...and how to beat the high prices of food these days.

Link below shows how these guys do biltong. Scroll towards the bottom.