spoonitnow AMA (and 10,000th post stuff)

[daviddem]

well this is the women and jerky thread, and I probably need to boost my man cred back up by talking more about jerky.

I made another batch starting yesterday. This time I just had a lot of food, and lots of parties and social events came together and had a couple packs of thin sliced pork chops that were going to go in the freezer, but instead figured I would try some pork jerky instead to avoid wasting anything. first world problems.

I started with 8 pork chops, roughly 2lb (~1kg) total. There wasn't any uniform thickness but some were pretty damn thin, especially after being handled on my cutting board to trim off fat/connective tissue. My cuts were thinner where the meat was thicker. It makes sense to me anyway

marinade 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/2 cup red devil hot sauce, couple dashes liquid smoke, garlic powder, and a tablespoon or so of brown sugar. I wanted to compare this to the other beef jerky I made without the sugar, see below.

I let that marinade overnight and then some, and put the meat directly on the oven rack again and this time set it to 200 with the door slightly cracked open for a couple hours first, as I was a little more paranoid using pork instead of beef. After that I set it to warm for a few more hours and have been picking at the smaller pieces. It really turned out well and this time does not have an overwhelming salty taste, despite marinating for significantly longer

For those that want pics just imagine a few dozen fairly small pieces of jerky. It pretty much looks like that. Maybe ever-so-slightly lighter than usual due to using pork instead of beef, but not much.

Also I am noticing that despite the amount of hot sauce used, the end product really isn't hot at all. That is fine because it still tastes really good, but I will probably start using less but adding something a little more concentrated like ground cayenne pepper or maybe a couple habaneros to the marinade.

Want hot? try: Dave's Insanity Sauce

My daily fix for hot sauce in the Philippines is Mama Sita's hot pepper sauce, made with "Labuyo" peppers (local bird's eye chili). This is hotter than Habanero Tabasco, and tastes far better.