Alpineaire Black Bart Chili Review

Back in the fall I bought two packages of Alpineaire Black Bart Chili from Amazon Prime. Today I decided to try one for lunch.

To prepared it, pour two cups of boiling water into the bag, mix, and then let sit for 10 - 12 minutes. Then mix it again before eating.

I let it sit for at least 12 minutes, mixed it up, and it looked like this:

It came out a bit soupier than I'd like. The texture was typical for reconstituted freeze dried meals. It was fairly spicy.

Because it was so soupy, after I ate half I tried adding some parched corn flour to it to thicken it a bit. Not recommended. I didn't care for the resulting texture.

Overall, I'd recommend it and will probably buy some more for my camping/emergency prep food stash.

Making Some Beef Jerky

Making some beef jerky this weekend. Weis had a 2-fer special on London Broil, so that's what I bought. It came out to a bit more than three pounds of meat. This is half.

The knife is a Terävä Jääkäripuukko 110 carbon steel model from Varusteleka. It came EXTREMELY sharp. I'll do a follow up post on the knife after I get the chance to use it some more.

I put the meat in the freezer for about a half hour before slicing, which made it firm, which in turn helped in cutting uniform slices about 1/8" thick. The puukko went through it like a hot knife through butter.

After slicing the meat I added the Nesco cure and spices, and now it's marinating in the fridge until tomorrow morning.

It should take about 10 - 12 hours in my Nesco dehydrator tomorrow. Gonna be good.

My plan is to freeze about half the jerky to bring with us when we go upstate for deer hunting in a few weeks. The rest will be for snacks until then.

Chaga Tea

As I write this I'm on my second cup of chaga tea, made from the stuff I got from russianfoodusa.com. I had to do some googling to see how to brew it, since the packaging was entirely in Russian, which I don't speak.

To brew the tea, I put about a tablespoon in a tea infuser, put it in my mug, then poured boiling water over it and let it steep for about 10 minutes.

The taste is very mild, maybe a little earthy. It would be pleasant on a cold day out in the woods.

Here's an article on potential health benefits of chaga.

There's Russian collusion in my kitchen!

On July 26th I placed an order with russianfoodusa.com (located in Brooklyn) for a few items:

• Bulgarian Brand "Filet Yelina" dry-cured pork tenderloin.
• Jewish Brand salami.
• Kharcho or Harcho soup mix.
• Hungarian style smoked pork fat back AKA salo.
• Chaga tea.

The order arrived on July 31st.

The dry-cured pork tenderloin is reminiscent of prosciutto. It would go really well with some cheese and crackers. My wife already told me that I should order more when it's gone.

The salami is excellent. I don't think it'll last long, either.

I tried the kharcho soup mix for dinner with some rye bread. It's quite good and spicy. It reminds me a bit of the broth in my wife's crab soup which uses a lot of Old Bay seasoning. I'm going to have to try it mixed in with buckwheat, a la Lars.

This morning (Saturday, 8/4) I tried the salo/fatback. As I understand it, because it is cured, in Eastern Europe salo is frequently consumed without cooking it first. However, the packaging warns to thoroughly cook it, so I sliced off four pieces and fried them up like bacon until the edges were browned and crispy.

Damn it was good. The inner, unbrowned parts just melted in my mouth, while the browned edges were crunchy. The paprika seasoning was mild, while the pork taste was subtle. I can see why Ukrainians love this stuff.

I still need to try the chaga tea, which I'll write up in a separate post.