spoonitnow AMA (and 10,000th post stuff)

[Lukie]

How do you make beef jerky?

Is it worth making? What about storage.. do you just leave it on the counter in the bag and you can eat it at your convenience for weeks or months? The only things I know about jerky are that venison jerky tastes great, and store bought jerky, while tasty, has a bunch of additives that I don't really want to add to my diet.

[spoonitnow]

How do you make beef jerky?

Is it worth making? What about storage.. do you just leave it on the counter in the bag and you can eat it at your convenience for weeks or months? The only things I know about jerky are that venison jerky tastes great, and store bought jerky, while tasty, has a bunch of additives that I don't really want to add to my diet.

I was actually in the middle of typing this one up. To answer your questions, I think it's definitely worth making, but it can take a couple of tries before you figure out what you like. I answer the storage question in the below. Depending on how you store it, you can get it to keep for several weeks at a minimum. Also, with jerky, the difference in the taste between beef and deer is practically zero. So much of the taste comes from your marinade that my family and friends can't tell a difference 9 times out of 10, and that's saying a lot since we eat a ton of deer.

I made a batch recently that I took pictures of just for this, but my phone ate them, so words will have to do. Here's the basic idea:

Step 1: Cut up your meat.
Step 2: Marinate it for however long.
Step 3: Dehydrate it for however long.
Step 4: Store it.

There are lots of different opinions on how to do each of the above four steps. All I can do is show you how I personally do it (which came after a bit of experimentation) and give you some other options.

Step 1: Cut up your meat.

Cheap sirloin steaks are a good place to start. You want as little fat as you can get because the fat will go bad very quickly. Some places have London broils for a cheap rate, and you can cut those up if it's cheaper on you.

In general, there are two basic ways that you can cut your meat. You can go with thin strips about 1/4" by 1/4", or you can go with wider strips that are like 1-1.5" by 1/8". If you want to make smaller pieces that are easy to eat as snacks, go with the 1/4" by 1/4". If you want your jerky to look more traditional, then go with the wider strips.

A lot of people suggest cutting with the grain. I actually prefer cutting against the grain because that makes the end product easier to pull apart.

Step 2: Marinate it for however long.

For the marinades, there are just tons of different ways you can do it. If you want something that tastes fairly plain without being spicy or hot at all, a good starting point is 2 cups/10 oz of soy sauce with 1 tsp of brown sugar. If you want a little more flavor, you can go with something like 1 cup soy sauce, 1 cup Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp liquid smoke. You can play with chili powder, chipotle powder and paprika if you like it hot. I've also used 2 parts balsamic vinegar with 1 part soy sauce with some onion powder and it's turned out great. You can look up a lot of marinade ideas online, but the soy sauce is really the basis of all of it. Also, store-bought marinades are mostly crap and generally defeat the purpose when people want to avoid shoving 48494 random chemicals down their throats.

As for how long to marinate, about 12 hours is sufficient. I've done it as little as 6 hours and as long as 18 hours without noticing much of a difference when compared to 8-12 hours.

Step 3: Dehydrate it for however long.

There are basically three ways to dehydrate. The easiest is to just put the shit in a regular dehydrator, and this is what I do. However, some people think that using a dehydrator that uses heat changes the flavor of the meat, and they would prefer to use cool air instead. To this end, you can build a cheap dehydrator using a fan and some racks for somewhere in the $30 range. I've done this before, and it takes a lot longer with a lot less consistent result in my experience.

A third method is to dehydrate in an oven. Basically, you hang the meat on toothpicks on the oven racks with a pan to catch the drippings under it, or you just lay it across the racks. Then you put the oven on a low setting (like 150-200 degrees), and you prop it open with a wooden spoon to let the moisture out. The idea is to dehydrate the meat instead of just cooking it. My dad prefers this method, and it takes just about as long.

For those of you who will be using a regular food dehydrator like I do, I can't recommend a specific time frame because different dehydrators work at drastically different paces. What I can tell you is that if it's squishy, it's not ready yet. If you can bend it while it cracks a lot without breaking in half, then it should be ready. If bending it causes it to just break in half, then it's probably been in there too long.

Step 4: Store it.

Don't eat it as soon as it's ready or it will taste weird because it's still warm. You need to let it cool off for a bit. If you're going to be storing it short-term, then small plastic bags like zip-loc bags are fine. If you're going to be storing it for the long-term, then you'll want something like a plastic canister that won't collect as much moisture. From what I've read and experienced, the jerky collects moisture mostly based on how much of its surface area is touching the plastic. A lot of it touches in bags, but not as much touches in vertical storage containers.

There is a ton about this online as well.

[Lukie]

[beef jerky, post #27, blah blah meow chow]

Trip report cliffs notes: Jerky came out good, really not all that hard to make, and as with pretty much anything you do more than once, there are improvements to be made. Some should have been obvious; some not so much.

I actually had planned on going to the grocery store yesterday anyway. There were sales on sirloin roasts of some sort, and I found one in particular that was fairly small and looked to be exceptionally lean. I used that one for jerky.

Got home, put it in the freezer (to make it easier to cut into thin slices), although I didn't leave it in long enough. This combined with a sharp-enough-for-everything-else-but-not-sharp-enough-for-this knife, and some ill-advised cuts, and about half of the 'strips' actually came out to be more like 'chip' sized. Some were longer; all were probably a tad thick. Some cuts simply weren't going to be useable for jerky so I stirfried those separately instead. All in all, I estimate that I got about a pound of reasonable jerky strips that I put in a bag and marinated.

Marinade was 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup red devil hot sauce (vinegar based cayenne pepper sauce, similar to Frank's), a splash of liquid smoke, and a decent sprinking of garlic powder. Some notes about the marinade: I probably could have used more but I'm cheap, and I used regular soy sauce though in the future I will probably use reduced sodium. This is saying something because I usually try to avoid reduced-fat or reduced-sodium anything, and bacon should be made from pigs.. but I digress. The end product was tasty but a bit too salty for my liking.

The meat marinated for roughly 4 hours, then I put the meat directly on the oven rack with a foil lined baking sheet underneath. Due to the amateur cuts of meat, most of the pieces only made contact with 1 or 2 spokes, probably not ideal, and in the future I will do my best to make better cuts and/or hang them from toothpicks as recommended.

I set the oven to between warm-200, say 175, and propped open the door ever so slightly with a spoon. Pro tip: real men use metal spoons, not wooden spoons, for this type of endeavor. I checked back somewhat frequently and began eating some of the smaller pieces after about 4 hours. Most I let go for 6-7. In my estimation this amount could probably be cut in half or possibly more depending on the efficacy of the earlier steps.

All things considered I am very happy with how it turned out. I have always liked jerky except for the price and additives of most mass produced jerky, this came out tasty, and there is utility that is kind of unique to jerky.