Preserving Food

[2006]

[Aajonus]

For Y2k. Yep. Everybody was panicking. I was a programmer, an autistic programmer, when I was autistic I was a programmer, so I knew that there was no danger in all of that. Bbut a lot of people were freaking out, so I was experimenting ways to preserve food.

A friend of mine shot a deer and I bled it and skinned it and butchered it, and we put it in different containers with different things: olive oil, peanut oil, kefer, buttermilk, all kinds of things. Every one of 'em preserved very well. I've still got some of that meat that sits in those jars that's just as red and as pretty as when I put it in those jars and six years ago.

So, if you want to do that, you collect it. Honey's a very good substance to have a lot of on hand, and I keep about five gallons, I keep five gallons in my, cupboard. I don't keep the same one. I keep rotating eating them, but I always have five gallons in my cupboard, so I've got all that raw meat in jars and it's not even in the refrigerator.

[Attendee]

None of them worked better than the other? They all worked equally?

[Aajonus]

They all worked just as equally, as long as you don't open the lid. Once oxygen gets into it, the bacteria grow.

There was a scientist that, Vladimir Steffenson, who worked for the government, studied the Eskimo. He quoted a scientist who kept a piece of steak fresh for 10 years using buttermilk, covered it in a jar, 10 years that meat was fresh, so it could have been longer than that. They just opened it after 10 years.

They have, they have a tendency to mold. They get blue cheese mold on them.

I've tried it everyway and I can't get butter to maintain, unless it's refrigerated.

Well, cheese does not have to be refrigerated, just dehydrates so much. Cheese molds in the refrigerator. Cheese will not grow and not mold outside of the refrigerator, cheese depends upon low temperature molds. That's why they put cheese in cold storages and in caves to get those molds to grow in the cheese to make the cheese. You can't make cheese without a mold, without some kind of a fungus.

In Asia, a native taught me how to preserve meat fat. She took duck fat, chicken fat, beef fat, and she would just take it and just put it out in the sun for an hour and it creates a plastic ceiling, just not really plastic, but it's just like plastic and it seals the fat.

So, I shared something with her that was a year old and it was delicious under no refrigeration. But you just bake it in the sun for an hour and it puts a ceiling over the fat.

[Attendee]

And then what do you do in?

[Aajonus]

Well, yeah, well she had it in a cooler, but you know, just out of the sun. There was no ice in it.

I would put it in glass of course, a gallon glass jar.