Salt-Cured Beef Charque
Beef packed in salt, then dried in air and sun until it can ride in a pack for a week.
- calories
- 330
- weight
- 2.5 oz
- cal / oz
- 132
- protein
- 45 g
- serves
- 8, scales
- prep
- 20 min
- cook
- 15 min
- total time
- 35 min
- water
- 400 ml boiled
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Snack
- Canister stove
- Campfire coals
- Backpacking
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Canoe / raft
- Gluten free
- Dairy free
- Nut free
- One pot
- Dehydrate ahead
- Shelf stable
- Actual cooking
Ingredients
| Lean beef roast | 2 lb (1000 g) | eye of round or bottom round, cut into 1-inch thick slabs |
|---|---|---|
| Coarse salt | 2 lb (1000 g) | yes, as much salt as beef; most of it never enters the meat |
Method
- At home: lay a bed of salt in a glass or ceramic dish. Set the beef slabs on it in a single layer, then bury them under about half the remaining salt.
- Cover the dish and leave it somewhere cool for 48 hours. Brine will pool in the bottom as the salt pulls water out.
- Pour off all the liquid, rinse the slabs briefly, and pack them in the rest of the salt.
- After another day, brush the salt off and hang the slabs in full sun or a dry breeze for 48 hours, until the outside is firm and leathery and they have lost roughly half their starting weight. A dehydrator at 145°F for 8 to 10 hours does the same job with less weather risk.
- In camp: tear or slice off a couple of ounces per person. Soak it in 400 ml of water for as long as you can stand, then bring the pot to a boil and simmer 10 to 15 minutes.
- Pour off that first water. It is almost entirely salt. Add fresh water, beans, rice, or whatever else is going in the pot, and cook from there.
Charque is the Brazilian answer to a problem every long trip has: meat is the heaviest useful food you can carry, and it spoils. Salt fixes both. Burying lean beef in its own weight of salt drives out most of the water in two days, and sun or moving air takes the rest. What is left is roughly a third of the original weight and keeps for weeks without a cooler.
The camp step people skip is the first boil. Charque comes out of the cure aggressively salty, and if you cook it straight into your dinner the whole pot is inedible. Simmer it once, throw that water out, and start over. The meat is also fully preserved, not cooked, so the simmer is doing double duty as the actual cooking. Use lean cuts only — fat does not cure, it goes rancid.
Packing
Wrap each dried slab in paper, not plastic. Sealed plastic traps the last of the moisture and you get mold instead of charque. A cloth bag inside the pack works.
Variations
- Simmer a piece with rice and black beans for a rough camp feijoada.
- Shred the boiled meat and crisp it in oil with onion flakes before adding it back to the pot.
- Cut the drying short by a day for a softer piece if you plan to eat it within a week.
https://charcutaria.blog.br/recipe/charque