How to Preserve Meat, Eggs & Dairy

This is your ultimate guide to preserving milk, cheese, eggs, and meat. We’ll cover the different options for preserving these products as well as safety concerns and guidelines to follow. Plus which is the best option, based on the end product and how you plan on eating it!

This is the Pioneering Today Podcast, episode #314! For this episode, I’m taking a deep look into our home food preservation and learning ways to improve or go deeper into my skills.

We grow 60-70% of our own fruits and vegetables on our homestead (grab my free charts to help you know how much food to grow per person per year here), and that includes preserving that food to use throughout the whole year in ways that work for our family and our food preferences.

We also raise 99% of our own meat each year. The 1% we purchase comes in items like the little bit of bacon I buy when ours runs out, a few packages of skinless, boneless chicken breasts I need for specific recipes, and the occasional chicken wings!

Because of this, we’re very reliant on the deep freezer, the regular freezer, or canning to ensure we don’t run out of food before the preserving season the following year.

I recently received a freeze dryer and have been testing out more methods of food preservation, most specifically in regards to preserving eggs, meat, and dairy products.

If you find yourself needing to find better methods for preserving these foods, today’s podcast is for you as I’m going to take a deep dive into the various preservation methods, and which methods I think are best for each category.

What is Freeze-Drying?

The way freeze-drying works is it uses a technique called sublimation. First, the food is frozen all the way down to -40 degrees F. At this temperature, all the moisture that’s in that food gets frozen in a vaporized form, then the vacuum mechanism kicks in and sucks all that moisture out. After that, it actually uses the same method as dehydrating to finish the freeze-drying process.

The end result is a product that retains over 97% of the vitamins and minerals of the fresh product and is shelf-stable for up to 20 years.

In my bit of experimentation, many methods of food preservation such as canning or dehydrating actually change the flavor of the food, which some people don’t enjoy. Freeze-dried food is very crunchy, almost like a chip and I personally think the flavors are intensified over the fresh food itself. I also love that freeze-dried food maintains the shape and size of the fresh food. So for us, freeze-drying has been a pleasant surprise.

Now let’s get into the different kinds of preservation methods for meat, eggs, and dairy…

Preserving Meat

When we’re preserving our meat in either a pressure canner, dehydrator, or freezer dryer, it’s usually with lean cuts of meat. The reason for this is that fat goes rancid much faster than the actual meat. Fat can also inhibit sealing when pressure canning so it’s usually removed from things like homemade and home-canned broth.

You can freeze meat items with the fat, however, most of us are limited to a certain amount of freezer space. We have to save our freezer space for the 1/2 cow we get each year (read here for our favorite cuts of meat to get), the 25 chickens we butcher, the crab we catch ourselves for the year, and the whole pig we butcher every other year!

So freezing extra food, whether it’s cheese, eggs, or even milk, it’s just not the priority over our year’s worth of meat!

Furthermore, if you lose power, you’d better have a generator as a backup so you don’t lose all that food!

So what other methods of preserving meat will allow us to free up some freezer space?

Pressure Canning Meat

You can safely can meat using a pressure canner. If you’re in the Home Canning With Confidence Course, you know I have lessons that I’ve walked you through on how to pressure can your meat. You can pressure can all kinds of meat such as bone-in poultry, cubed beef, ground beef, and even sausage to name a few.

Curing Meat

Cured meat is an incredible option if you’re willing to read up on the best practices to follow. I have a post on how to dry cure meats you can read here.

I’ve also salt-cured ham in the past and that turns out incredibly good. These are longer processes, but they’re fantastic options.

Dehydrating Meat

If you’re using a regular dehydrator, most of the meat still has a relatively short shelf-life, and it’s best if refrigerated for long-term storage.

When freeze-drying meat you can store your meat at room temperature for up to 20 years! Now, I’m not guessing most of us will actually need to store our meat that long, but if you needed to, ya could!

The tip for freeze-drying meat is to freeze dry it fully cooked. That way, when you reconstitute it, it’s fully cooked and ready to eat.

The nice thing with freeze-dried meat is that you can’t add too much water back to it. It will only take up as much water as is needed to be back to its normal consistency.

This is something that can’t be safely done in a regular dehydrator.

Preserving Eggs

For a more in-depth look at eggs, especially long-term preservation methods, check out the podcast I did on storing and preserving eggs with Lisa Steele (episode #310).

Cold Storage

But to recap, you can store unwashed eggs that still have the bloom on them in the refrigerator for months with no issues!

Freezing Eggs

You can freeze eggs by whipping the egg yolk and white together, then freezing. Frozen eggs are great for baking or using in recipes, but not necessarily to eat as scrambled eggs.

Liming eggs

Limed eggs are a great option for storing eggs for up to a year or more, however, this requires you to have a space where you can store them in a large 5-gallon bucket (or multiple buckets depending on how many eggs you’ll need for the year).

I haven’t gone this route because I don’t have the extra space where the temperatures stay at a constant temperature year-round unless I keep them in the middle of my living space!

Dehydrating Eggs

You can dehydrate eggs in their cooked form. But I’ve found they don’t taste that great, and the fact that they have to first be cooked limits their use for baking in the future.

Freeze-Dried Eggs

My new favorite method for preserving eggs for long-term storage that are both able to be cooked and eaten “fresh”, or used in baking.

I can preserve 54 eggs in each freeze-dried batch which takes about one day. My hens are getting older so the above two 1-quart jars were 36 eggs. When we’re discussing the amount of space our preserved food takes up, this is by far the smallest amount of space (especially when you consider that’s 3 dozen eggs!).

The taste of freeze-dried eggs is also phenomenal. I did a blind taste test with my daughter and they won out over all the rest! Check out How to Preserve Eggs with a Freeze Dryer for Long Term Food Storage

Preserving Milk

Since we are recently new dairy cow owners, it’s especially important to learn how to preserve the abundance she provides.

The first way you preserve your milk is by refrigeration. This is how the majority of us keep our milk lasting weeks instead of days.

Culturing

In the Pioneer days and for centuries before this, the best way to preserve milk was to ferment it.

This is a fantastic method that actually improves the health benefits in the milk and fills the end product with beneficial bacteria!

I have a traditionally prepared buttermilk recipe on the blog and a homemade yogurt recipe as well. But fermenting or culturing your milk will preserve it for varying amounts of time, depending on the product you turn it into.

Cheese Making

Milk can be preserved longest as a hard cheese. You can also make cottage cheese, feta cheese, cream cheese, etc. I love soft cheeses but they just don’t last as long as hard cheeses.

Having a variety of methods to preserve your milk is best so you can keep it year long. Even after learning ancestral cheesemaking methods for better health and delicious products, you still need an area of your home where you can keep the cheeses at a cool temperature.

Check out natural cheese making, homemade marinated cheese balls and my tutorial for smoking hard cheeses.

Freezing Milk

You can freeze milk for long-term storage, but I’ve found that after a few months in the freezer the texture changes, and it becomes a bit grainy once defrosted as those fat globules don’t redistribute well into the milk.

Freeze-Dried Milk

With my Harvest Right freeze-dryer, I’ll be freeze-drying our own milk and coffee for instant homemade versions. Here are some must-know freeze drying tips that my friend, Carolyn Thomas, shared with me.

Where to Get a Freeze Dryer

If you’re interested in buying a home freeze dryer, check out Harvest Right! I have the medium-sized unit.

Verse of the Week – Galatians 5:26

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