You’d have to go along ways to over cook bear especially fall bear with all its fat.
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You’d have to go along ways to over cook bear especially fall bear with all its fat.
No it’s not lol a lot you know .. bear is well marbled with fat
Plenty of testing on trich strains that infect bears.
Some notable ones are that freezing for several years, varying temperatures between -2 and -30 did nothing to destroy it... still ready to party, eggs/cysts ready to hatch many years later. Bear meat and fox meat both tested.
The freezing myth comes from some trich strains in the south that were an issue in pork meat half a century ago.
You can't kill trich in BC bears by freezing, for 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years or even a decade. It just doesn't happen. Around 15-20% of bears in the Fraser Valley have trich and the number gets higher (75-90%) up in the territories.
You only have to do one thing to make it a non issue and that is cook it to 165 (instant death for trich) or study and be confident in lower temperatures at longer durations. The data is available... X minutes at 140F is safe, Y minutes at 150F is is safe. All I know is internal temperature of 165F is instant death and safe. I don't cook beat meat for steaks... mostly ground for hamburgers, sloppy joes, burritos, etc... I can cook it at 165 for 1 minute or 5 minutes and it tastes the same. If I wanted a "well done" (because that is the only way to do it) bear steak, I'd figure out the X minutes at 140F so I could get away with my steak "slightly well less done" .... but I prefer ground
I do freeze it as soon as I can. I treat bear meat as if I acquired a 4 liter jug of milk in the bush on a 20-30 degree day and want to keep it good. That means get it cool fast (put game bags in garbage bag, soak it in snow run-off drainage (coming out from ice a few hundred meters above) plop it in the cooler with ice... if it is late in the day and I have no ice, as long as temps are dipping good and I got the meat cool I will wait until morning before ripping home. Then we get busy with the grinder and vaccum packing... if I'm confident the meat was at cool temps so far throughout the process, I'm fine with leaving half it in the fridge until the next day... if I shot it 10AM and didn't get it home until 4PM, was fighting off flies the entire time, no ice along the way, I make darn sure it gets processed and frozen ASAP.