Prep School: Meat Camouflage

By Ash Bauer

Copyright 2012 Ash Bauer

Kindle Edition

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

HAMMERING OUT THE TEXTURE

BRINING AWAY THE FLAVOR

CHICKEN FRY EVERYTHING

NO ONE ASKS WHAT’S IN A MEATLOAF

CONCLUSION

Welcome to Prep School!

It’s easy to be intimidated by a hardcore prepper with 30 years of food stores, multiple bug-out locations, and an off-the-grid power system. Prep School exists to let you in on three big prepping secrets.

SECRET ONE: Nobody starts perfect.

When those prepping powerhouses first started they were just as clueless as you are. Even Navy Seals had things to learn.

Nobody expects you to become a prepping expert overnight. Prep School is for people who are interested in prepping for a crisis or disaster but aren’t really sure where to start. Each article tackles a specific topic such as making primitive weapons, preserving meat without power, and the special survival needs of ladies.

If you’re an advanced prepper who could use a quick refresher on a specific topic you can spend $1.49 on a single essay. There’s no need to waste your money or make you wade past information you could teach in search of the good stuff you need. If you’re just getting started, you can pick up individual books or save a little cash and pick up our $2.99 Theme Packs where we bundle related articles into a single book. Only buy what you need. Spend the rest on your preps.

SECRET TWO: Prepping is fun.

Stockpiling food and ammo may sound grim and intimidating, but you know what most preppers do in real life on a daily basis? Sports and crafting. It’s the same stuff millions of ordinary Americans do every day for fun. On the sport side you’ll find people who love archery, shooting, and martial arts - all things kids do at summer camp for the sheer joy of it. As for crafters, you can find entire suburban stores dedicated to cranking out supplies for beer making, knitting, canning, soap making, and sewing. Etsy exists just to give crafters a way to get rid of all the fun stuff they make. People create things because it’s fun. Preppers are normal people with a cause.

The difference between mainstream sports and crafting versus prepping is focus. Sure, the skills are fun, but they’ll also help keep you alive if the stuff hits the fan.

You’ll find people in prepper communities are thrilled to make friends (and future allies). The thing people forget about hardcore preppers who are ready to survive whatever the world throws at them is they got that way because they honestly enjoyed the process.

INTRODUCTION

We’re not just prepping for ourselves. We’re prepping for our kids, our spouses, and sometimes for our non-prepper loved ones. Most of them are willing to go along with the highly processed meals, canned goods, and dry goods preppers stockpile, but all that cooperation comes to a screeching halt when dealing with meat.

This edition of Prep School walks you through the annoying reality of coaxing picky eaters into eating their meat. Preppers themselves typically embrace being an omnivore. After all, humans can eat just about anything that isn’t a rock, and if that rock is salt, we’ll make an exception. However, any parent knows modern kids are notoriously picky eaters. As a parent, it’s your job to make sure they get fed. As a prepper, you need to preserve your mental energy for keeping your family safe in those first days or weeks after a crisis. Feeding kids something they’ll find familiar can help you accomplish both.

Similarly, spouses or other family members who only eat lunch meat, frozen dinners, or boneless, skinless chicken breasts can be just as picky and hard to deal with during a crisis or disaster.

Prepping isn’t just about stockpiling weapons, medical supplies, and food. It’s also about the psychology of survival. The best way to circumvent fights and prevent wasting precious food in the future is to gradually introduce it to people now, in forms they find familiar.

Modern Americans are spoiled. We can take it for granted we can walk into any grocery store any time of day and pick up a package of giant, juicy, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. It’s entirely beside the point that the breasts are so large because we’ve bred chickens to be physically unbalanced then pumped them full of growth hormones, or so juicy because the meat is then shot full of saline solution to make it look plump on the shelf. The important part is your home consumer didn’t have to kill an animal, much less pluck, skin, or debone it.

We joke that anything unfamiliar “tastes like chicken” when the fact is, even chickens don’t taste like chicken anymore. They’ve become a nearly neutral protein structure lattice on which we add flavors of salt and a few spices. Your average American school kid will throw away a piece of chicken that tastes like a real hen, insisting its gone bad.

Beef is just as bad. It should have a rich, earthy flavor full of iron, but by the time processing is finished, it’s little more than a different texture of meat.

This can be a real problem for prepper families. Part of becoming self sufficient includes literally putting meat on the table. Some of it will be meat you grow yourself, such as backyard chickens and rabbits, and some will come from hunted animals ranging from large game like deer to small animals such as squirrels, possum, and wild hare.

If you’re facing a survival situation, the last thing you want to deal with is a picky kid (or spouse, or family member you’ve taken in during a crisis) turning up their nose at your hard won meat. It’s easy to say they’ll learn to like it when they’re hungry, but for those first few critical weeks or months after a crisis, you, as your family’s prepper, will have way too much to deal with without that extra stress.

The best thing to do is start acclimating people to alternate meats and alternate cuts of meat now. It’s hard. Schools serve your kids overly processed, sugar filled meat pastes that taste nothing like the real thing. Every day they eat in the cafeteria, they’re being taught to like weird, artificial products our great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food. At work, we eat sandwiches made with processed lunch meat that tastes of nothing more than salt and artificial hickory smoke infusion or go through fast food lines where the meat is made from ammonia infused pink slime. Fighting to get your family to eat real meat is an uphill battle. Luckily, there are shortcuts you can use to disguise your real meat while you slowly teach your kids, spouse, or loved ones to accept a natural flavor and texture.

HAMMERING OUT THE TEXTURE

Our great-grandparents had a totally different relationship with meat. First off, it was incredibly expensive. A Sunday roast was a very big deal, because for most families, that was the only solid piece of muscle they could afford each week. Any other meat came in the form of sausages, thin deli slices, or maybe hamburger, and those tended to be stretched out as far as possible.

On the rare occasions when your average family could afford extra meat, it usually came in the form of a tough cut or a less popular muscle, such as tongue. To make either one more appealing, you could pound it nice and thin with a meat hammer. You might see a little hammered meat in the grocery store today, but the technique has mostly faded from popularity in favor of chemically processed then frozen meat products.

Hammering is a great way to make an unappealing cut of meat more appetizing. First off, the sharp points in a meat hammer break up the tough bonds in the muscle. This instantly makes the meat more tender, and therefore more appetizing to modern palates. It also has the added bonus of making the meat thinner, which means visually, people feel like they’re getting a larger portion. Two ounces pounded flat can fool someone into thinking they have a real main course instead of feeling like they’re being cheated when they see a chunk of muscle the size of a large chicken nugget. In addition, hammering disguises the muscle so you really can’t tell what part of an animal it came from - or even what animal.

Since people are so distanced from real meat a lot of them can’t tell the difference between a well pounded slice of beef tongue, rabbit leg, or squirrel. By the time you’re done, they’re all about the same color, texture, and thickness. If you tell a picky school kid or spouse who isn’t quite on board with prepping what they’re actually eating they’ll insist they knew it from the start. If you just put it on their plate, hungry people will usually have a few bites before they notice anything is unusual.

A hammer is cheap. Using it is a great way to take out your frustrations with your picky family members without actually hurting them. You’ll be amazed how eagerly they’ll eat a piece of tongue if you simply soak it overnight to drain out the blood and some of the flavor, pound it thin the next day, then batter it up and serve it as chicken fried steak.

BRINING AWAY THE FLAVOR

Squirrel and rabbit actually have a lovely flavor one you’re used to them, but getting a picky eater past those first few bites can be a miserable challenge. A lot of people understandably go straight for hiding the meat in a thick, heavily seasoned stew. That’s a great tactic if you’ve laid in a good supply of spices. The meat gets softened as it boils and the flavor is hidden by the seasonings. By the time you’re done, those nutritious protein chunks could’ve come from anything.

However, if you’re not a fan of overly spicy foods or you wisely want to save a lot of your seasonings for the long run, you can also use the time honored method of brining to leach out flavor while adding tenderness to your meat.

Kosher salt isn’t salt that has been prayed over by a rabbi or processed in some way laid down in the book of Leviticus. Those blue boxes you see in the bottom isle of the grocery store are used for kashering, which is the process of making something kosher. To make a meat kosher, it not only has to come from an animal raised according to kosher laws, but the blood also has to be drained from the animal. Salt is a great way to do that. Cultures around the world have used salt to preserve and sanitize meat for centuries.

A lot of meat’s flavor comes from the blood. Brining meat not only draws out the blood, but also hydrates the muscle cells through osmosis. You’re essentially leaching out some of the most offensive flavors and replacing them with the neutral tastes of salt and water.

Brining won’t magically transform deer into beef or rabbit into chicken thighs, but it will cut down on the gamey flavor, making it a lot easier for you to either disguise the meat using other techniques or, over time, ease your picky eaters into liking it without hitting them with the full flavor out of the blue. Brining is also great for adding moisture to wild birds, which are naturally drier than the chicken and turkey currently available in grocery stores.

A good rule of thumb for brining is to use is 1 cup of water and 1 ounce of salt for every 1 pound of meat.

That means that once skinned and gutted, a healthy four pound rabbit you’ve raised in a cage can be soaked in 4 cups of water mixed with ½ cup (4 ounces) of salt and left to soak for 12 hours or overnight. You can add other kitchen herbs to the brine in order to flavor it. However, I’ve found that’s most effective when dealing with nearly flavorless meats, such as modern grocery store chickens and turkeys. If you’re dealing with the hearty flavor of unfamiliar meats, you’re better off saving your herbs and spices for flavoring sauces, sausages, or adding to the surface during cooking in order to get the highest impact from the seasonings.

In the event of a crisis or disaster, salt will become a valuable commodity. You can reclaim some of the salt you used in brining. After your meat is soaked and removed, boil down the water so most of the moisture evaporates. You don’t want to risk damaging your pans by boiling it down all the way, so once you have a thick, salty sludge, pour thin layers of it onto cookie sheets or other suitable flat surfaces and leave them in a sunny place. The rest of the water will evaporate within a few days, leaving you with some mildly adulterated salt crystals.

It’s incredibly important that you boil the salt water for a minimum of 10-15 minutes. This will kill any bacteria lurking in the meat. It’ll probably take you a lot longer than that to boil the water down, but if you’ve brined a small squirrel or hare, you won’t need much water. Never skimp on boiling time when reclaiming salt.

Once the salt sludge dehydrates, you can use a wood or rubber spatula to scrape the brine salts and remaining meat byproducts (mostly dried blood. Don’t worry, once boiled it’s harmless) into a tupperware container. Make sure to label it “Used brining salt.”  Next time you brine meat, use half reclaimed salt and half fresh. That will help you retain a valuable resource.

Alternately, if you keep animals outdoors, you can boil the water for 10-15 minutes in order to kill off any bacteria, let it cool to room temperature, then pour it into suitable buckets or bowls. Both cattle and dogs love a salt lick. As long as they have plenty of access to fresh, clean water, the salt water will be an extra treat for them, especially on hot, sweaty days. If you have regular access to electricity and extra freezer space, you can even freeze some of the boiled salt water into a block of ice and leave it out for your animals on hot summer days. It’ll help them cool down and get some valuable salt into their system at the same time.

CHICKEN FRY EVERYTHING

At this point, you’ve brined your meat to leach out all the unfamiliar flavors then pounded it thin to give it a soft, familiar texture, but it still looks, tastes, and smells suspiciously like deer. In a genuine crisis, you may be half tempted to tell picky eaters they can starve for all you care. Right now, though, your job as a prepper is to acclimatize your kids, spouse and loved ones to the meats they’ll be eating after a crisis or disaster.

If your food preps include a large stockpile of flour and oil, you’re set. In a pinch, you can make due with just the flour. After all, even lean animals have some body fat you can render for use in cooking.

Pounding meat thin, coating it in flour or an egg batter, then pan frying it is a great way to get your picky eaters to clear their plates. Our bodies naturally crave fats and carbohydrates, things that were difficult for us to find in the wild. That’s why sweets tastes so darn good even though our distant ancestors never hunted or gathered a big slice of chocolate cake. You can make cardboard delicious if you batter and fry it.

In Scotland, you can bring just about anything to a fish and chip shop. They’ll dip it in batter and deep fry it for you. This is how the Fried Mars Bar got started. Once Americans got a hold of the concept, our state fairs exploded with deep fried improbabilities from twinkies to Coca Cola.

Do you really know what you’re eating when you’re given fried, breaded meat on a stick? For that matter, do you really want to know what’s in those drive-through chicken nuggets? No. People today have been taught to accept anything with a meaty texture as long as it’s battered and deep fried. You can use this to your advantage. Take a piece of beef tongue, brine it, pound it, batter it, and tell your family it’s chicken fried steak. They won’t know the difference. Chicken fried deer is great. Meat from cage raised bunnies tends to be a lot more tender than people expect. It makes great dark meat chicken nugget substitutes.

You can find plenty of great recipes for fried chicken. Those have the best batter for chicken-fried-everything-else. Call your deer, squirrel, rabbit, goat, or whatever else you’re serving “chicken fried steak” and encourage people not to ask too many questions if they don’t want to know the answers. Right now, when they can hop in a car and pick up an equally dubious “chicken fried steak sandwich” at Sonic, they might turn up their nose. However, in the case of a crisis or disaster, they’ll be grateful you took the time and energy to disguise food in order to match their current tastes.

For proof of how depressingly effective this tactic is, watch the sad YouTube video, Jamie Oliver’s Nugget Experiment Epic Failure. The kids in this video watch him carve away all the expensive, familiar parts then put the disgusting bits of bone, connective tissue and skin in a food processor and turn it into paste. Then he turns the result into chicken nuggets. The kids watched him this whole time and told him how disgusting it was, but once it was in the shape of a familiar chicken nugget, they eagerly ate it and said they liked it. If you have kids (or a picky spouse, or non-prepper family members you took in) to feed, don’t be too proud to use this to your advantage. You’re going to have enough stress coping with a crisis or disaster. You don’t need picky eaters making it worse.

NO ONE ASKS WHAT’S IN A MEATLOAF

Any prepper who expects to do a lot of hunting in the case of a crisis or natural disaster should seriously consider investing in a meat grinder. It’s not the sexiest piece of survival equipment, but it’ll go a very long way towards helping you stretch out meat, integrate fat into the meat, and process parts of the animal that are useful but unattractive.

The most obvious use for a meat grinder is sausage. If you’ve stocked up on nitrates (to prevent botulism from forming in your meat) you can add seasonings, grind up the least attractive cuts, and end up with something people will be eager to eat on a bun. I recommend finding a good book on charcuterie for lessons on making your own sausages from scratch.

Even if you don’t preserve your meat as sausages, putting it through a grinder first is a great way to turn it into familiar forms for picky eaters. Throw your deer, squirrel, or rabbit into a meat grinder and out comes “hamburger.” If you have a whole family to feed but only one squirrel to share, this is a great way to stretch out the limited amount of meat by turning it into spaghetti sauce or a casserole filling.

Grinding meat is also a great way to add both fillers and flavors. Meatloaf has classically been a way to add bread, onions, sometimes even a hardboiled egg to your meat in order to make it stretch. When dealing with particularly strong gamey flavors, the acid in tomatoes will help tame and disguise the flavors. Tomatoes aren’t good for sausages (the moisture content is too high), but they’re great for sauces and meatloaves.

Grinding meat also makes it a lot easier to hide the flavor behind a wall of seasonings. The disadvantage of that for preppers is that herbs and spices are likely to become rare and expensive after a crisis or disaster. You may not want to dip into your stockpile for seasoning your own food. After all, historically, a lot of people got very rich on the silk road by trading in spices. After a crisis or disaster, spices (especially those that are difficult to grow in your local climate) will become valuable trade goods.

Luckily, depending on the climate where you live, you can grow a lot of herbs for yourself.

Herbs are leafy plants such as thyme or basil. Spices are the ground up seeds of plants, such as cumin or anise. A few plants provide both. Cilantro and coriander come from the same plant, coriandrum sativum. Cilantro is the leaf and coriander is the seed.

In general, spices have stronger flavors and preserve for longer. They’re expensive because they’re made from seeds, which tend to be pretty small and sometimes difficult to harvest. Herbs are larger and cheaper, but often have weaker flavors.

The good news is herbs are the seasonings most familiar to your average American and British readers and are great additions to your garden if you decide to bug-in. Before you decide what to plant, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the latest USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map or a European Plant Hardiness Zone Map. You can grow whatever you want in a greenhouse, but if you’re gardening or planning larger scale self sustainable food production, you won’t achieve equally healthy mint leaves and chili peppers in the same plot of land. Pick herbs you already enjoy which are suitable to your local climate. Reputable seed catalogs will have their inventory listed by Hardiness Zone so you can be sure you’re buying something that will thrive where you live.

Growing your own herbs now is also a great way to save money. A scant handful of fresh leaves at the grocery store can cost around $5. A handful from a thriving plant in your home garden only costs you the time it takes to water and weed.

When the time comes to process tonight’s meat, grab a handful of your favorite herbs and add them into the grinder. They’ll do half the work of masking the meat’s flavor for you. From there, you can add stale bread to absorb extra moisture and help bulk out the meat then turn it into familiar shapes like burgers, meatloaf, lasagna, or spaghetti sauce.

As long as it doesn’t look like a rabbit leg or chunk of deer, people are willing to fool themselves into forgetting they’re not eating cow. After all, hamburger sales didn’t plummet after we learned we were eating ammonia treated pink slime. Do yourself a favor. If your family isn’t on board with prepping, make your life easier by investing in a meat grinder.

CONCLUSION

In a perfect world, our kids would be eating real food at school and our spouses and family would be on board with prepping. Mind you, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to prep.

Here in the real world, we’re stuck with kids and family who have picky tastes. As a prepper, you can make dealing with them easier by adding a meat hammer, meat grinder, and lots more salt to your preps.

Brine their meat, then either pound it thin and chicken fry it or put it through a grinder and turn it into familiar shapes. Yes, it’s more hassle than serving a nice deer steak or rabbit soup, but it’s worth the peace of mind. As they get used to the taste, they’ll get tired of the extra work. You’ll know you’ve succeeded the day a formerly picky person says they don’t feel like grinding the meat tonight. Let’s just eat it as a deer steak instead.

If you enjoyed this, check out other Prep School lessons including:

Prep School: Simple Cider Homebrew

Prep School: Preserving Meat Without Power

Prep School: Unarmed Self Defense

Prep School: Cooking Without Electricity

Or save money with our Guns and Weapons Theme Pack.

Stay safe!