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🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach:
https://eliasyoder.com
Imagine for a moment that the power goes out tomorrow morning. Not for an hour. For a week. The freezer in your basement, full of meat you spent good money on, slowly turns warm. The bacon, the chicken, the pork chops — all of it on the slow path to ruin, and you have no way to stop it.
Now imagine the same thing happening in my barn. My grandfather's smokehouse is still standing out behind the milk house. The crocks in our cellar are full of meat my wife Esther put up last fall. There is a ham hanging from the rafter, dry and dark, that has been there since November. Not one of those methods needs a single wire from the power company. And if the lights go out tomorrow, my family will eat just the same as we have eaten for two hundred years on this same county.
In this video I walk you through the nine real methods my people use to preserve meat without a fridge or a freezer — salt curing, smoking, sugar curing, vinegar brining, lard storage, the root cellar, the winter cold, drying, and pressure canning. Every one of them is genuine, every one is still in use in Amish households today,
https://eliasyoder.com
Imagine for a moment that the power goes out tomorrow morning. Not for an hour. For a week. The freezer in your basement, full of meat you spent good money on, slowly turns warm. The bacon, the chicken, the pork chops — all of it on the slow path to ruin, and you have no way to stop it.
Now imagine the same thing happening in my barn. My grandfather's smokehouse is still standing out behind the milk house. The crocks in our cellar are full of meat my wife Esther put up last fall. There is a ham hanging from the rafter, dry and dark, that has been there since November. Not one of those methods needs a single wire from the power company. And if the lights go out tomorrow, my family will eat just the same as we have eaten for two hundred years on this same county.
In this video I walk you through the nine real methods my people use to preserve meat without a fridge or a freezer — salt curing, smoking, sugar curing, vinegar brining, lard storage, the root cellar, the winter cold, drying, and pressure canning. Every one of them is genuine, every one is still in use in Amish households today,
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Imagine for a moment that the power goes out tomorrow morning.
00:03Not for an hour. For a week. Two weeks.
00:07The whole grocery store loses its cold cases.
00:11The freezer in your basement, full of meat you spent good money on, slowly turns warm.
00:17The bacon, the chicken, the ground beef, the pork chops,
00:21all of it on the slow path to ruin, and you have no way to stop it.
00:25Now imagine the same thing happening in my barn.
00:28My grandfather's smokehouse is still standing out behind the milk house.
00:33The crocks in our cellar are full of meat my wife Esther put up last fall.
00:38There is a ham hanging from the rafter, dry and dark, that has been there since November.
00:44The cold weather is doing some of the work, and the salt is doing some of it,
00:48and the smoke is doing some of it, and the lard is doing some of it.
00:52Not one of those methods needs a single wire from the power company.
00:56Not one of them was invented in my lifetime.
00:59And if the lights go out tomorrow, my family will eat just the same as we have eaten for 200
01:05years on this same county.
01:07My name is Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
01:13My family has been butchering and putting up meat without a refrigerator since long before refrigerators existed.
01:20Today I want to walk you through the methods we still use.
01:24The same methods you can use, whether you live on a farm or in a townhouse,
01:29whether you are a hunter putting up venison, or a thrifty homemaker doing right by a sale on a pork
01:34shoulder.
01:35These are not survival tricks. These are everyday methods.
01:39And they make meat that taste better than anything you ever pulled out of a freezer.
01:44Before I go further, for the folks who want all of this,
01:48every method I have shown on this channel and the ones I have not gotten to yet, all in one
01:53place,
01:54I have put it together in a book at my website, EliasYoder.com.
01:58I will not push it again in the video. If you want it, it is there.
02:03Now let me show you the methods.
02:05I will also be honest with you, before we go a single step further,
02:10because this is the most important honest word I will say all video.
02:14Curing meat at home is real work that has real consequences if you do it wrong.
02:19There is a thing called botulism, a poisoning so serious that careless home curing has killed people through history,
02:26and I will not have you on that list.
02:29I am going to show you the safe methods, in the safe order, with the safe ratios.
02:35And the rule for everyone listening, especially the beginner, is the same.
02:39Start simple, follow a tested recipe, and respect the work.
02:44Jerky and smoked sausage are forgiving.
02:47A whole country ham or a jar of pressure canned meat is less forgiving.
02:52Walk before you run.
02:53With that said, let me take you through it.
02:57Stay with me.
02:57The first method, and the oldest, is salt.
03:01Salt is the grandfather of all meat preservation.
03:04Long before there was ice in the ice box, and certainly long before there was a fridge in the kitchen,
03:10every people who raised animals figured out that salt would keep meat.
03:14The Romans paid their soldiers in salt.
03:17The word salary itself comes from the Latin word for salt money.
03:21Salt was once worth more than gold in some places.
03:25And every old farmhouse in this county once had a salt box on the wall and a barrel of cured
03:31meat in the cellar,
03:32because that is what got a family through the winter.
03:35The why is plain chemistry, and once you understand it, you understand all the rest.
03:42Bacteria, the little creatures that spoil meat, they need water in the meat to live.
03:47They cannot live in a dry place.
03:49Salt is what they call thirsty.
03:52When you rub salt onto a cut of meat, the salt pulls the water out of the meat.
03:56The meat dries.
03:58The bacteria starve.
04:00The meat keeps.
04:01Now here is the part the old books are plain about, and the internet is sometimes vague on,
04:07so I want to give you the real ratio.
04:09For a dry salt cure, you use about 2.5% salt by the weight of the meat.
04:15That is the number.
04:16Most home cures go between 2 and 3%.
04:19So for every pound of meat, about 450 grams, you weigh out roughly 11 grams of salt, which is about
04:272 teaspoons.
04:29A 5 pound pork belly takes about 3 or 4 tablespoons of salt to cure right.
04:35You can add a little sugar, half a percent to 1%, to soften the harshness of the salt and let
04:41the flavor come through.
04:43You rub that salt mix evenly over every surface of the meat, every nook, every fold.
04:50Then you set it in a cool place, between 36 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit,
04:55which is about as cool as a good root cellar runs in the summer or a cold pantry in the
05:00winter,
05:01and you let the salt do its slow work.
05:04A small cut, a few days.
05:06A bigger cut, a few weeks.
05:08A whole ham, several weeks to several months.
05:11The method is slow.
05:14That is why it works.
05:16There is one more honest word, and it is important.
05:19For longer cures, especially for whole muscle meats like hams that hang and dry,
05:25the safe methods include something called curing salt, or what folks call prog powder number one, or tender quick.
05:33It is salt mixed with a tiny dose of sodium nitrite, just one part to 15, and that tiny dose
05:41is what stops the bacterium that causes botulism.
05:45Plain salt alone is enough for short cures and quick jerky.
05:49For anything that hangs long or smokes low, the curing salt is what makes it truly safe.
05:56The old butchers knew this in their bones.
05:59The modern science just put a name on it.
06:01Use a tested recipe, use the right curing salt at the right percentage, about a quarter of one percent of
06:08the meat's weight, and the danger goes away.
06:11That is salt, the oldest method, the foundation of every method that follows.
06:17The second method is smoke.
06:19After the salt has done its work, the smokehouse does the rest.
06:23Walk behind nearly any old Amish farm, and you will find a small wooden building, dark inside, with a tin
06:31roof and a low door.
06:32That is the smokehouse.
06:35Inside, year after year, hang the hams and the bacons and the sausages of the family.
06:41Smoke does three things at once.
06:44First, it dries the meat further, and as I told you, dry meat does not spoil.
06:50Second, it leaves a coating of natural compounds on the surface of the meat that are not friendly to bacteria.
06:57Third, and this is the one folks remember, it gives the meat the deep, savory flavor that no oven and
07:05no machine can quite match.
07:07There are two kinds of smoking, and you should know the difference.
07:11Cold smoking is done below about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, just smoke, very little heat.
07:17This is what makes a true smoked ham or a country sausage that hangs for months.
07:22Hot smoking is between about 160 and 225 degrees.
07:28That is what cooks the meat through as it smokes, the way smoked ribs and barbecue brisket are done.
07:34Cold smoking needs proper salt cure first, because the temperature is in the danger zone for bacteria.
07:41Hot smoking cooks as it goes. Both have their place.
07:45The wood matters.
07:47The old folks used hickory for the deep, smoky flavor.
07:51That is the king of smoke woods in this country.
07:54Apple wood for a sweeter, milder smoke, often on poultry and pork.
07:59Maple, oak, pecan all work.
08:03Never use pine or any soft, sappy wood.
08:06The sap and the resin will ruin the meat and can make you sick.
08:09A few good chunks of hardwood, a small, smoldering fire, slow, steady smoke for hours or days, depending on what
08:18you are smoking.
08:19That is the whole craft.
08:21And properly salt cured, properly smoked meat, a country ham, hung in a dry, cool place, can keep for many
08:29months, sometimes longer than a year.
08:32Months without a single watt of power.
08:34The third method is sugar, and I say this knowing how strange it sounds.
08:40Sugar by itself does not preserve meat.
08:43But sugar with salt makes a softer, sweeter cure.
08:47And that is what gives you a proper old fashioned sugar cured ham, or sugar cured bacon, or the kind
08:53of breakfast meat that tastes like Sunday morning at my grandmother's table.
08:57The recipe is salt plus brown sugar, sometimes with a little molasses or honey, sometimes with a few spices like
09:04black pepper and bay.
09:06The same two to three percent salt, plus a half a percent to one percent sugar by weight, rubbed onto
09:13the meat, and cured the same way as a plain salt cure.
09:17The sugar softens the harsh edge of the salt.
09:20The flavor that comes out is sweet and savory at once.
09:23Now what nobody tells you about sugar cures is this.
09:28The sugar feeds the good fermentation that happens slowly in a properly cured meat.
09:34The bad bacteria stay starved on the salt.
09:37The good ferments do a small quiet work that gives old fashioned cured meat its depth.
09:44That is the why behind the wonder.
09:47Folks who taste a true sugar cured ham for the first time often say, what is in this?
09:54And the honest answer is, just salt and sugar and thyme.
09:59Before we go on to the next method, let me pause for a moment.
10:03For the folks who want help putting these old fashioned home saving methods to work in their own house, my
10:10wife Esther and I have a place where we go deeper on all of this.
10:14We call it the Amish home savings system, and there is a community of folks in there working through it
10:21together.
10:22Esther and I are inside answering questions, and the community helps you stay with it.
10:27The link is below in the description.
10:30Now, to the next method.
10:32The fourth method is vinegar.
10:35Vinegar, plain white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, makes a brine that bacteria cannot live in.
10:42The acid is too sour for them.
10:45So when you take a sausage or a fish or a piece of pickled pork and put it in a
10:50vinegar brine with spices,
10:52the vinegar does what the salt does in a salt cure.
10:55It makes the meat hostile to spoilage and gives it that bright pickled flavor folks either love or have to
11:03learn to love.
11:04This is the method behind pickled herring, pickled sausage, pickled pig's feet,
11:10the kind of jar that used to sit on the counter of every country store.
11:14The brine is vinegar, a little salt, a little sugar, and whatever spices belong with what you are pickling.
11:21The meat goes in cooked or raw depending on the recipe, the jar gets sealed,
11:27and the meat keeps in a cool place for weeks, sometimes months.
11:32A small honest word here.
11:34Vinegar is less protective than full salt curing or pressure canning.
11:39So vinegar brined meats are best kept in a cool place, a cold pantry or a refrigerator if you have
11:46one,
11:47and eaten within their proper time.
11:49It is wonderful for a few weeks.
11:52It is not a way to make a piece of meat shelf stable for a year.
11:56Know what each method does and use it for that.
12:00The fifth method is lard, and this one surprises folks.
12:04The Old French call it confit.
12:07The plain English farm version is potted meat or meat in lard.
12:12The idea is this.
12:14You cook a piece of meat slowly, then you submerge it completely in melted rendered fat, lard in our case,
12:22from the same pig you butchered, and you let the fat cool and harden around it.
12:28The hardened lard makes a perfect airtight seal.
12:31No air, no bacteria.
12:34The meat sits in its own cool, fat-sealed jar for months in the cellar.
12:40When you want it, you scoop a piece out of the lard, warm it gently, and eat it.
12:45The meat that comes out is tender, rich, and unspoiled.
12:50The lard itself you save and use for cooking.
12:54Nothing wasted, ever.
12:55This works best with rich meats like duck legs, goose, pork shoulder, and sausage.
13:02It is one of the oldest methods in farm cooking, used long before any refrigerator existed in any farmhouse in
13:10this country.
13:11The sixth method is the root cellar.
13:14The cellar is not itself a curing method, but it is the home of every curing method.
13:19A proper root cellar, a stone-walled or earth-bermed space dug into the ground or built into a hillside,
13:27stays naturally between about 32 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit all year round, summer and winter.
13:35That is the temperature of a refrigerator, kept by the earth itself, with no power, no compressor, no bill.
13:42Inside the cellar hang the cured hams, the smoked sausages, the crocks of lard-sealed meat,
13:49the jars of pressure-canned beef, the barrels of brined pork.
13:54The cellar gives every method I have shown you a safe, cool, dark home.
14:00The constant cool slows what little spoilage chemistry remains.
14:04The dark keeps light from doing its small harm.
14:08The earth holds the temperature steady.
14:11A good root cellar is the heart of an old farm pantry.
14:15I have spoken about how to build one before on this channel.
14:19If you missed that video, do go back and watch it,
14:22because every method I am showing you today works ten times better
14:27when it has a proper, cool, dark cellar to live in.
14:31The seventh method is winter itself.
14:34This one is the simplest.
14:36When the temperature outside drops below freezing and stays there, as it does for months in Pennsylvania winters,
14:43the whole outdoors becomes a freezer.
14:46The old farmers butchered their hogs in November and December for a reason.
14:50The cold did half the work of keeping the meat.
14:54A side of pork hung in a clean, unheated barn or smokehouse in January will keep for weeks without any
15:01other treatment just from the cold.
15:04You wrap the meat in clean cloth, burlap or muslin to keep flies and dust off it, hang it in
15:11a place that stays consistently cold, and check it daily.
15:15Once the cold breaks in spring, the meat needs to be salted, smoked, canned or eaten.
15:22But for those cold months, the winter does the work for you.
15:26This is why butchering was always a winter practice in old farm life.
15:30Not because nobody got hungry in summer, but because winter was the time the meat could be handled and worked
15:37without spoiling.
15:38The whole rhythm of the farm year was built around what the weather would let you do.
15:43The eighth method is drying, what most folks call jerky.
15:48You take lean meat, beef, venison, turkey, even chicken, cut it into thin strips, season it with salt and spices,
15:58and dry it slowly until almost all the water is gone.
16:02Dry meat will not spoil.
16:05Dry meat keeps for months in a jar on the shelf.
16:08A pound of beef becomes a few ounces of jerky, light and tough, that you can carry in a pocket
16:15and eat in the field.
16:16The honest safety word on jerky comes straight from the food safety folks at the agriculture department.
16:23The meat should reach an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit at some point in the process,
16:30either by a brief cook before drying or by the temperature of the drying itself,
16:35to kill any bacteria that might be in the raw meat.
16:39After that hot moment, you can dry at a lower temperature, around 140 degrees, until the meat is dry and
16:47leathery.
16:47This is the modern science that confirms what the old folks always did at their hearths.
16:53Start hot, finish dry.
16:56For wild game and pork, freeze the meat for a few weeks first before making jerky.
17:01That kills any parasites that might be there.
17:04A small precaution, well worth it.
17:07The result is the lightest, longest keeping meat there is.
17:12Months on a shelf.
17:13Years if you vacuum seal it or keep it cold.
17:17Real food, real protein, ready to eat any time.
17:21The ninth method, and the most modern of the old methods, is pressure canning.
17:26Now I will tell you plainly, pressure canning is not as old as the others.
17:31It came into wide farm use in the early 1900s.
17:35But it has been on Amish farms for as long as my own grandfather can remember.
17:40And it is the most reliable way to put up cooked meat for the long haul.
17:45The method.
17:46You cook the meat, pack it hot into clean glass jars, seal the jars, and put them in a pressure
17:52canner.
17:53Not a boiling water bath, a pressure canner, under high steam pressure for the time the recipe calls for.
18:00The high pressure raises the temperature inside the jars to about 240 degrees Fahrenheit.
18:06Hot enough to kill every bacterium and every spore, including the spores of the botulism bug.
18:13The jars seal as they cool, air tight, and the meat keeps on a pantry shelf for years.
18:20Three to five years easily if stored cool.
18:23The safety word here is the most important in the whole video.
18:27You must use a pressure canner, not a water bath canner, for meat.
18:32And you must follow the tested times and pressures from a real source.
18:37The USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, your county extension office, or the Ball Canning Book.
18:43Do not guess. Do not shortcut.
18:47Improper canning of meat is the most common way folks have died of home food poisoning in this country.
18:53Done right, it is one of the safest and most useful methods you can learn.
18:59Done wrong, it is dangerous.
19:01I would rather you wait and learn it properly than try it from memory.
19:06A jar of pressure canned beef on the pantry shelf is a thing of beauty.
19:10Open it, warm it in a pan with broth and vegetables, and you have a hot meal in fifteen minutes.
19:17Three years after you canned it. No power required.
19:21Now I want to take a moment because this is the part that matters.
19:25Look at what we have just walked through.
19:28Nine methods, every one of them older than the refrigerator.
19:32Every one of them used in working Amish households today.
19:36Every one used in working farmhouses across this country and the world before the power lines went up.
19:43Salt, smoke, sugar, vinegar, lard, the root cellar, the winter cold, drying, pressure canning.
19:54Together, in different combinations for different meats, these nine methods will keep meat from spoiling for months and sometimes years.
20:03And here is the quiet thing about it.
20:06When you preserve meat this way, the meat does not just keep, it gets better.
20:11A ham that is hung six months in a smokehouse is a better ham than the one you put in
20:16the smokehouse.
20:17A jar of canned beef has a depth of flavor a fresh roast cannot match.
20:23Sugar-cured bacon tastes like nothing that comes off a styrofoam tray at the store.
20:27The methods are not a compromise. The methods make the food.
20:33There is no money for the grocery industry in teaching folks this.
20:37There is no profit in a family that buys a side of pork once and eats off of it for
20:42a year.
20:42So the knowledge has quietly faded.
20:45The cured ham at the store comes wrapped in plastic and full of chemical preservatives the old butchers would not
20:52recognize,
20:53and most people no longer know there was another way.
20:57But there was, and there still is, and it works as well today as it did in 1825.
21:04My grandfather butchered every fall and never once owned a refrigerator.
21:10My father did the same. I do the same.
21:13Esther runs the kitchen end of it the way her mother did, the way my mother did before that.
21:18The meat in our cellar right now would keep my family fed through a winter with no power, no grocery
21:25store, no help from anyone.
21:28That is not survival living. That is normal living, the way it was done in this country for 200 years
21:35before the electric companies came.
21:36You can do the same. Not all at once. Start with the simple methods. Make jerky first.
21:43Learn to brine. Try a small salt-cured pork belly to make bacon.
21:48Get a pressure canner and learn it properly on simple things before you try meat.
21:53Build the skill year by year, recipe by recipe, until the day comes that you can stand in your own
22:00pantry and know that you can feed your family from your own work with no wire from anywhere.
22:07So here is what I want you to do. This week, pick one of these nine methods, the simplest one
22:13that calls to you.
22:14For most folks, I would say jerky because it is the most forgiving and the safest to start with.
22:20Buy a few pounds of lean beef or venison. Cut it in thin strips with the grain. Salt and season
22:27it.
22:27Dry it in a low oven that hits 160 degrees in the first hour. Finish at 140 until it is
22:34dry and leathery.
22:35And store it in a jar in a cool place. Once you have done that, once you have eaten meat
22:41you preserved with your own hands, the rest of the methods will not feel strange anymore.
22:46Tell me in the comments below which of the nine sounds like the one you would try first.
22:51Jerky? Salt cure? Smoke? Lard storage? Pressure canning?
22:57And if your grandmother or your grandfather kept a smokehouse or a cellar, tell me what you remember of it.
23:03Because those memories are the very knowledge I am trying to keep alive on this channel. I read every single
23:10one.
23:11Next time, since we have spoken of putting meat up for the long winter, I am going to show you
23:16the old way my people render lard from a side of pork.
23:21The slow heat. The cracklings. The storage. Every step from the fat scraps to the jars of clean white lard
23:29on the cellar shelf.
23:31It is the natural next step after today. Until then, get a good thermometer, get a good recipe, and start
23:39with the easy ones.
23:41The old folks did not learn this all at once. Neither will you.
23:45But one method at a time, you will build the kind of pantry that the grocery store cannot give you.
23:52The home, you will give the sham.
23:52The new car, you'll see.
23:52The new car is the new car, you're able to use the car, you'll be careful with the car, you
23:52got your car.
23:52The new car, you've been the car, you've been the car.
23:52You
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