So we got back from a 2 week vacation to find the freezer in the garage had gone out on us, we ended up losing about 100 lbs or so of pork and chicken and a little beef, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. As we were cleaning up from it my wife was looking at the bright side by say "Good thing this didn't happen as we were leaving for the airport to catch our plane, that would have been a bigger mess, how would we have handled that, it's better that it happened after we left and didn't know it so we are only out a few hundred dollars? "
Added to this instance, her sister lives outside of Ottawa and they lost power for 10 days about a month ago after some severe thunderstorms rolled through their area, they didn't have a generator and they lost a lot of food. We have a generator in case power goes down but both of these instances led to a larger discussion of how we would have handled this since in our case it wasn't an issue of the power being out but the freezer its self breaking and with the supply chain issues since corona it's harder to get parts or new freezers.
We have a pool that uses a salt water chlorine generator and a water softener for the whole house so we always have about 400-600 lbs of rock salt or pool salt on hand. Given that, as we were brainstorming what we would do if we suddenly didn't have a freezer my thought was for the meat that wasn't ground was to simply bury it in salt or a salt brine instead of lose it.
My parents grew up on on farms during the depression and I remember back in the day in the early 70's when I was a wee punk and meat prices spiked they raised a couple of hogs with a neighbor and when they were slaughtered that winter all the meat was arranged on a folding table on the back screen porch in a shallow 8 inch deep wooden box and it was all simply buried in salt until we used it.....I can't remember if they did anything else, I know they didn't smoke it, but they are both gone so I can't ask.
I did a search and found this vid, but it used a frig and is for small batches:
I know rock salt isn't processed for human consumption and I also know there are special curing salts............anyone have any further resources or info on anything like this?
Added to this instance, her sister lives outside of Ottawa and they lost power for 10 days about a month ago after some severe thunderstorms rolled through their area, they didn't have a generator and they lost a lot of food. We have a generator in case power goes down but both of these instances led to a larger discussion of how we would have handled this since in our case it wasn't an issue of the power being out but the freezer its self breaking and with the supply chain issues since corona it's harder to get parts or new freezers.
We have a pool that uses a salt water chlorine generator and a water softener for the whole house so we always have about 400-600 lbs of rock salt or pool salt on hand. Given that, as we were brainstorming what we would do if we suddenly didn't have a freezer my thought was for the meat that wasn't ground was to simply bury it in salt or a salt brine instead of lose it.
My parents grew up on on farms during the depression and I remember back in the day in the early 70's when I was a wee punk and meat prices spiked they raised a couple of hogs with a neighbor and when they were slaughtered that winter all the meat was arranged on a folding table on the back screen porch in a shallow 8 inch deep wooden box and it was all simply buried in salt until we used it.....I can't remember if they did anything else, I know they didn't smoke it, but they are both gone so I can't ask.
I did a search and found this vid, but it used a frig and is for small batches:
I know rock salt isn't processed for human consumption and I also know there are special curing salts............anyone have any further resources or info on anything like this?
