Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve taken down the dreaded moose. However, now I’m faced with a problem…
I have hundreds of chunks of meat and fat, and it’s all spoiling in a day. Outside of a freezer/fridge how can I make this all last?
I can make the fat into lard to keep, but the meat expires so quickly and there’s no time for me to eat nearly any of it, and I’ve used up all of my cans, so I can’t can any of it…
Tips?
Dry it. You need to have charcoal smoking racks stocked with charcoal, so you’d have to prepare that before you take down another one. You’d also need multiple racks (3 is a good number, although you can use one or two additional ones for a moose, I think).
PALU has the right idea here, you should prepare both some charcoal and a few smoking racks before going for a big kill. As well, having enough cooking skill and spare time set aside to make the lard for the fat is a good thing to do. All of the other bits or whatever doesn’t fit can either be burnt, or could be cooked and fed to your NPCs if you have a camp. I’ll also add that you can smoke meat in the smoking rack a second time to make it last even longer, in case you didn’t know.
Haven’t been playing for a while, is smoking a better solution than dehydration?
I’ve always been using the latter, never tried the first…
If you smoke meat once at the smoking rack, you get smoked meat; smoke it twice and it dehydrates!
The last few times I started a new game, I started at the “safe location - lake cabin”; there’s a little hut with a pair of smoking racks, a butchering rack, a table, and a charcoal kiln, so one can process meat pretty efficiently!
That’s a little treasure to start with, for sure.