Drying rack for jerky

[VintageStory enjoyer]

I would like drying rack to be added for jerky making

[SnapJelly]

I believe drying meat for jerky would require smoke of some kind, if you hang them up like that the wasps would get to it real quickly

[Kulze]

Meat drying through nothing but the air is a common thing.
It's a form of dry-aging simply.

Thin stripes cause the moisture to get out and makes them dry in ~48 hours unless too thick, then it takes 3-5 days instead. Very tasty as well, and extremely easy to make.

As for wasps... yeah... in reality a issue, keep them behind a insect-net of some sort but still with airation. The bigger issue are flies which can lay eggs and cause maggots, then you know you haven't properly sealed the space.
It 'stays edible for ~1-2 months when properly done at room temp. Smoked jerky if properly kept has a similar lifetime actually.

But for drying meat... I would especially love to see proper medieval original middle-european drying methods. Those lasted the longest out of any known ones. In my country - Austria - for example bacon was preserved with salt and smoked afterwards in autumn, nothing more done to it. That meat wasn't touched until easter, hence after the winter.
So one might say 'but why wouldn't they eat that meat during winter?'. Because it hasn't gotten the right flavor yet... you ate the meat from last year instead. 16+ months old bacon was a common thing to eat and perfectly safe as well. My grandfather still made it in this original way once a year, impossible to get a better and stronger flavor profile of bacon plainly spoken.

If something's dry it doesn't go bad, that's all it is. And that's also why modern 'smoked' products do go bad, they're not traditionally made with a rub but instead injected with brine. Same taste, vastly cheaper to make on a industrial scale and fitting for the quick turnover in grocery stores as it needs no long-term storage spaces to create.
Taste profile is absolutely atrocious in comparison though if someone ever had the original, and it's also why nice big strips of bacon fried in the pan become little poor wrinkly crispy bits, that's all moisture which goes out of it.

[Sunny_Sometimes]

Drying and smoking are definitely mechanics I'd like to see. Unless you get a lucky spawn, most of the current food-preservation methods only become available after you're already awash with more food than you know what to do with (assuming you've been farming). It ends up feeling more like a gameplay novelty than a survival tool.

[Momito]

This could potentially be used to solve some of the problems I have with game meat. Game meat is kind of useless outside the first day or so. It's just junk, once you have your cookpot, and the fishing rod, which you can get on day one, has made it doubly useless.

If you could dry game meat on the rack, either air drying or putting it over a fire for smoke (a bit like the boiler for the still), that would make it useful for preservation - this could potentially be quite good for artctic playthroughs where food can be more scarce. To balance it against red meat, it could be somewhat less nutririous, and also be like soya beans - needs to be cooked in a pot.

[DeanF]

There is already a mechanic to salt meat- that probably cover's grandma's bacon.  But I agree that jerky would be a welcome addition.  I share the frustration that bushmeat is arbitrarily made inferior to red meat in so many ways.  (I understand that this is done to encourage agriculture and pastoralism, instead of just remaining a hunter-gatherer.  But why can't someone be a hunter-gatherer if they want?)  After the first couple of months bushmeat is basically only good for stinkbait.

So yes, we should be able to make jerky from any meat, including bushmeat.  For balance, it should probably lose a little nutritional value in exchange for the longer shelf-life.  Or maybe it needs to be made in a smoker instead of just dried, as I discuss here:

If that isn't considered enough, then require cooking it in a pot with some water before it can actually be eaten.  Hmm, something like hard-tack (or pilot bread) might work the same way...

Pemmican would be awesome, too.  Powdered dried meat, fat, and berries.  You should at least need a pot to make it, with very little fuel needed.  The recipe would probably be 2 dried meat, one fat, and one berries for one pemmican.  So there would be a hierarchy of shelf-lives.  Raw meat spoils quickly, cooked meat a little slower, jerky and pemmican much slower, and salted meat the slowest.

But I suspect that the devs might object to pemmican on the grounds that since it has such a great shelf-life and can be made so easily in the early game, why would anyone make anything else?  So jerky and pemmican should actually have about the same shelf-life, with pemmican having an advantage in being more nutritious (since it has berries) and is more compact in your inventory.  Sort of like how one pie slice takes up the same inventory space as one cooked meat, but it much more nutritious..

Edited August 8 by DeanF

[SnapJelly]

40 minutes ago, DeanF said:

Hmm, something like hard-tack (or pilot bread) might work the same way

sure but charred bread kinda already functiones much the same way as hard tack would

 

41 minutes ago, DeanF said:

The recipe would probably be 2 dried meat, one fat, and one berries for one pemmican.

I think a singular piece of fat would serve a much better purpose sealing a crock or something than being part of a single meal

[DeanF]

Just now, SnapJelly said:

I think a singular piece of fat would serve a much better purpose sealing a crock or something than being part of a single meal

Not once you have beeswax for sealing crocks.  Then it's a bit redundant.  Even more so once you are making leather.
Actually, I have never done an oil press- can you use vegetable oil in place of fat to make furs?

[Smelly345]

the amount of fat used in real world pemmican is 1:1 by weight, meat:tallow. the meat is first dried, then ground, then mixed with melted fat. left to cool and harden. you can add basically whatever to that so long as it contains no water. dried fruits, and grains. though if you add grains its less pemmican and more a weird bread.

5 hours ago, DeanF said:

Actually, I have never done an oil press- can you use vegetable oil in place of fat to make furs?

No, olive oil is only used for oil lamps and linseed oil has no use. :<

in the real world i know you can use a whole host of thing to treat hides, egg yoke, plant oil, fish oil. you name it. the actual important part of furs and hides is working them after curing so the hides stay pliable when dry. furs are still often smoked as part of the preservation process.