Bushcraft Knives: Using Animal Fats

Description

Become a Patron:

https://www.patreon.com/MCQBushcraft

Bushcraft Basics Blog - http://www.mcqbushcraft.co.uk/bushcraft-basics/

Amazon Store:

UK Store - http://astore.amazon.co.uk/mcqbushcraft-21

US Store - http://astore.amazon.com/mcq-20

Merchandise:

T-Shirts - http://mcqbushcraft.spreadshirt.co.uk/

Connect On My Website - http://www.MCQBushcraft.co.uk

Connect On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/MCQBushcraft

Connect On Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/mcqbushcraft1

Connect On Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/MCQBushcraft

Tags: woodland,forest,mountains,river,lake,tinder,Survival,Bushcraft,survivor,knife,knives,valley,axe,camping,tent,footwear,hunting,fishing,backpack,clothing,boots,primitive,nature,shelter,shooting,shotgun,rifle,rucksack,flashlight,torch,craft,plants,trees,education,wilderness,family,hobbies,fun,animals,game

Video Transcription

hi there guys I thought it'd be good to do a video about maintaining equipment in the field you know maintaining tools like knives and saws and axes metalwork leather work and having other functions from those applications that you use to maintain those tools is something that we're always kind of looking for in all of our different types of kit that we carry

you know multifunctional equipment is really the key to saving weight and adding functionality to your kit and I always find that the best kind of applications to use are those that can be found in the natural world and if you experiment with those items even on a commercial scale you get an idea of how you can use them even if you did find them naturally

and it all adds to that learning curve knives for example these knives here they're 1095 carbon steel and they're very good knives and it's a very good steel it has a tendency to be sensitive to moisture so if I don't look after them they'll spot rust especially overnight while I'm sleeping and then when I get up in the morning if I've got rust on the finer parts of the blade that aren't coated I'm going to have a bit of a problem and a job to do in the morning before I even get a fire going so having something that you can apply that sticks to the blade nicely you can cook with you can make candles out of you can maintain your pots and pans and swords and axes and your leatherwork it also carries a few other sort of other bespoke functions as well that can be combined with wild edibles to make sort of antiseptic balms and barrier creams it's a natural resource that's available out there and it's something that I've used for some time now and I really like it in the top of my pack here I keep a small tinder patch inside the tinder pouch here I keep a small metal tin with a plastic lid and inside that tin I've got some blonde goose fat or rendered goose fat so before considering fat you might want to think about where you live in the world there going to be a risk of predators for example I've had comments from guys from other channels who say that fat isn't an option for them to be putting on their leather work for example because you know they have a problem of bears so it may just be something to consider before you actually go out and start using fat and putting it in your pack and using it on your kit but for me fat is a good resource in my part of the world I don't really have to worry too much about predators at all and you know fats kind of readily available commercially na VI hunters well so it's always good to know how to utilize them in the render fat off of the animals you hunt which is great although small game at certain times year fat is few and far between but it is there in part and it is very useful but this is goose fat like I say and there are two types of goose fat really and this really applies to all fats as well as rendered and unrendered and in the term of goose and duck it's blond or brown blond being rendered Brown being unrendered and brown basically just means when you cook a duck or a goose or anything in the oven lots of fat comes off of it that's unrendered brown fat basically and if you poured that into a glass container it would be very brown and discolored in part and of a lot of other particles in there and you know its shelf life would be very short because there are lots of other bits and bobs in there that will basically make it turn rancid a lot quicker than if you purified it but there's a really easy way of purifying fat out in the field or in the kitchen wherever you may be and all you need to do is fill a pot with water not too much water make sure it's nice and hot put it on a heat source and bring it to a steady boil let it sort of cool off a tiny bit obviously you know you just want to sort of sterilize the water if you are outdoors so bring it to a boil and then sort of let it simmer a bit and then just take your unrendered fat and put it into the water and it will sort of separate out obviously in liquify and you know mixing with the water and turn it very cloudy and then just bring that to a very steady simmer for some time maybe like five or ten minutes and what they'll be doing is killing all the bacteria in that fat that will obviously make it turn rancid and shorten its shelf life and it'll be separating out all those other bits and what you can do then is take that off the heat take it off the boil for example or let it cool down you know pour it into a container and what you'll find is the water separates from the fat and you're left with a very sort of more pure and white substance at the base we'll all the monkey stuff in the water has risen to the top and you can pour that water away reheat it transfer it into another container or store it away that's a very good way of preserving the shelf life now I say I use goose fat and there's a few advantages for goose fat it's very healthy fat to use it's very good to cook with and you know obviously a lot of fat comes off of a goose so if you do shoot a goose down or you cook a goose you get a lot of fat off it I've got a container at home about that big glass container in the fridge off of one goose now if the fat's in a container like this you know there is a reason why I've got it on this in this container and I'll explain that in a bit because there's a few different reasons actually but this doesn't get a lot of sunlight in my pack which is a good thing you don't want to expose it to too much sunlight because you're short on its shelf life and you don't want to expose it to too much oxygen or a startle shorten its shelf life as well which is a good reason why you should reheat the fat and put it in a container so it's sealed so all this fat around here never gets exposed to oxygen only the top does then provided you keep using it

you keep getting rid of the fat that's probably being exposed the most and you keep replenishing it and it won't go rancid quite as fast but this will probably have a shelf life of about six months in my pack it's probably been in them in there for about four now and it's doing very well if it was in the fridge probably get about twelve months out of it provided I'd purifying it like I discussed earlier but with pork you get a much longer shelf life not quite as healthy to cook with this goose fat just probably one of the trade-offs but yeah with pig fat basically you've got about twelve months in a pack with it like this and in the fridge you know stored away properly I don't even know I mean it's probably indefinite you've probably got a hell of a lot of time on that and you could keep it there for years and years and years you know provided you stored it properly would probably even need to be in the fridge if it was in a sealed container of sunlight in a cool box somewhere or in a cool room you could really store it for a very very long time so it's some trade-offs between the two that and I work with both you know when this is run out I might use pig fat again just really depends on what I've got at the time so using the fat really couldn't be easier at the end of the day usually just take the knife take a bit of fat put it on the blade and just drag it down the reason I don't start there is because that's the edge I drag it down the edge like that just to avoid cutting myself and you can take some of the excess off just move to the other side obviously I've taken the spine off this as well and just glued it so I can use it for other things and there we go and the great thing about the fat is it really does cling to the blade I've found even when carving and battling through large chunks of wood the fat still been on the blade at the end of the day to a certain degree which is really good we have tools like this one here this is a folding tool and you may want to get some sort of lubrication inside this sort of mechanism here if for example I usually take a side by side shotgun out sometimes do a bit of shooting and I'll spend some time camping out well sometimes even take an air rifle and you know it's been raining very heavily and I want to make sure I get some sort of lubrication inside the action of that of the jaw of the gun to make sure that moisture doesn't set in there and kind of cause spot rusting overnight sort of stiffening up the action the same goes with this particular tool here or any kind of folding knife now with a spoon like this you can put a bit of fat on it put it over a fire but obviously just drape the fat into the areas you want it to go so the nice thing about it is it is nice and solidified so it isn't going to spill anywhere but at the same time you can liquefy it if you want to use it like an oil for example but it's good for leather work too as we've seen in other videos you can smear the fat on the leather work and it's really useful for just kind of fending off moisture on that leather work but another useful thing you can do with it obviously as you can eat it which is great it tastes good it's nutritious for you when you're out cooking some mushrooms or a bit of meat or some wild edibles it really does help to have something like that so you're not burning things if you do tend to fry them I've got a small plate here this is a life adventurer titanium plate and this is my primary frying pan and you may think well it hasn't got a handle but with a bit of improvisation you can make handle just to clip on so here we are this is the pan with the handle and the handle is very simple it's just a piece of hazel with a notch cut in it with my laplander saw or with a knife you can use either or and it's very very simple but it allows you to just be quite a distance away I can make this handle as long as I want in it and angle I wanted to so I could even have it like that and be sitting down and cooking it's a very very easy design and just carrying a very light plate like that really does help and it doesn't need to be nonstick because the fat really does come into its own in that perspective stops things like wild mushrooms and things sticking to the pan and allows you to cook them a bit better the same with meat although I find me obviously has its own fat in it and it generally stops sticking after a while anyway but if we pluck that off there you can see I've just cut a notch in there

norther knotch does is slop down on the edge and you can see this pan has a lip on it and the lip just locks in and if you get a little wood shaving what you've used in the process of making this just push it on the underside as long as you're not cooking on an inferno and you're working on embers it'll be absolutely fine but it's a great little pan really does work well and another important thing is always skin the bark because bark has bacteria in it so you don't really want any bark going in there which is why I always skin it'll and those are some really good uses for fat you can cook with it you can use it to maintain your metal work and leather work but there is a reason why I keep it in this metal tin and it does come into its own in another way as well and it really works great with fire lighting if any of you watch the tinder fungus video I did some time ago you'd have seen that I process some material out of a fungus called Ganoderma rostral or southern bracket it's a bit like foams foam antarious or as a trauma layer you can get kind of material a highly absorbent material out of it and it makes a fantastic natural natural wick and the reason why it's in a metal tin is simply because it allows me to make a candle very easily and not without taking the fat out of the tin and transferring it somewhere else if I take a piece of this tinder fungus material I can actually break off a portion of it just like that you can see that's full of fibers very very absorbent material and that's why it makes such a good wick but all we need to do is rub a lot of fat on it now so I usually push it into the fat like that and smear the fat all over it you really want to get that fat in there but in a minute we're going to use a bit of heat to really help so once you've put a bit on there you can see there's a lot of fat smeared on there get the rest off your fingers you probably do a neater job than I just did I'm going to use a piece of birch bark and a Ferro rod to get a naked flame going and I'm going to use the aid of that flame to help more fat absorb in and then ignite it and put it in the top of the candle we've got some heat there and you use that just melt more of the fat in look you could obviously use a lighter for this if you scrape enough shavings from the Ferro rod you can kind of get a bit of a flame you

we want to just get a bit more fat soak it in

that should burn now should start to burn

what you can do you can see the flame is dwindling a bit it's get a stick and just bring a bit more fuel up to the front up to the flame like that just get it going get rid of that you just want to kind of nurture it a bit is the more fat you put in that wick the less likely it is to scorch and burn out and get too charred so we want to start getting fat fed up that absorbent material to the top you can see there once we've got a bit of a flame going even with a bit of a breeze we're not doing too bad if you made a nice little wind barrier for that you've got fantastic candle for the evening so this candle is still burning happily a lot of the fats liquefied now that might be a good opportunity to then use that fat to drip into other bits of mechanisms and things like we talked on folding knives but it is a fantastic natural resource and something that's very easily purified in the field but there is another thing that it can do and it can act as a you know an aid in a barrier cream it's good for things like chapped lips and sort of dry areas of skin but it's a certain planter and hopefully I can find it I know there's a water source quite deep in the woodlands there quite a lot of fallen trees around there so I'll have to be careful lots of flooding around here at the moment so the ground because there's a lot of clay there's nowhere for the water to go for all the roots softening up a lot of trees are coming down some of the biggest ones you wouldn't even suspect but we're going to go over to that area blimey wonder what that was pheasants didn't like it much but we're going to go over to that area and we're going to have a look for this plum I'm going to put this candle out and we're going to mix it with some of this fat and we're going to make an antiseptic cream or a barrier balm that's really good for sort of cuts and grazes in the field sort of fight infection to keep sort of bacterial rights and also sort of stop the flow of bleeding as well so we'll pack this up we'll get a move on so the plant I'm looking for should be growing around here we've got feeling and I have to have a good search around to find it very flooded did I ever have a few nice edible plants around there like this bit across so a bit of a mission but I've managed to find it growing by this little stream here bit of a risky place really to spend some time yeah for a long time obviously not just me here now all these roots are very exposed and the banks are caving in

see this big beech trees gone behind me but yeah this plant generally likes to grow by water but you will find it in way size and hedge raised very very commonly it's just at this time of year you're really looking for the ideal environment for the plant because you won't really find it on the hedge sides anymore

it would have died away and this is a very good environment for lots of different plants edible poisonous and medicinal because obviously there's a water source here let's have a closer look at the plant we've got some hedge wound got here in a very dwarven state I found some slightly better examples but at this time of year there is going to be very reduced and I'm very surprised to actually even see it around because you normally find it very very much in abundance you know by roadsides and way sides and you know in the woods where sunlight hits the forest floor and we've got a nice open patch above us and obviously the lights coming in and it's got an interesting little microclimate around here so we've got quite a lot of different plants growing in one place at a time of year where some of them aren't really commonly seen but this plant here is quite a powerful antiseptic and very good for stemming the flow of blood so it really does close off blood vessels and stop the flow of blood stop bleeding and it disinfects the wound as well helps fight any potential risk of infection so a very very good plant to know so if you are going to make a topical remedy at these two components here or a medicinal plant of your choice and some factor or a binding agent then the ratio is going to be a lot higher on the side of the plant you know you want to really mush the plant up into a pulp and a pestle and mortar and use a lot more than this you know a large quantity of it and mix it with the fat mix it all together make sure that the fats nice and green you've not mulched it all together so when you apply it nice and thinly you've got the plant really doing its thing the fat is just there as a binding agent and if we can keep the dirt out and keep moisture so if the just just go on the wind you can clean it away very easily which is the good thing about the fact that will allow you to do that quite quite easily there so there are a lot of topical plants out there that you can use to do this with and catch wind water is just one of them and it's just one of the many plants we found almost all year round you know this time of year you're really searching for it in a symphony it's probably not going to be as potent as it is in the summer where it will reach quite a degree of maturity and you'll also have a flower to utilize as well but the whole plant is an antiseptic including the roots as well which is a good thing about edge wound or

I hope you've enjoyed the video guys and it's been useful don't get too many good evenings at this time of year or days in fact to do any videos I've been able to get out and sometime the torrential rains are coming in without 80 mile an hour winds in some parts of the country all these trees have been falling all over the place I've lost my internet connection lost my phone line lost the powers of the house obviously I live on the edge of the woodland here and there you know the big trees have been falling down and taking out the line so what CBT and coming along to repair it next week so hopefully I'll be back up and running again but thank you again for watching and I appreciate all the support and hope everybody's well the flooding hasn't really taken out too many people in this country has been pretty tragic and there's nearly been to my doorstep on a few occasions with the with the river versus Bank unfortunately we've taken a few measures we've helped the local farmers to stop that happening the thanks again for watching and I'm going to sit here and enjoy the evening and take care you