This is a first for us, normally we would buy jerky premade and packaged. But we decided to give it a try this time and see how it came out. Well id say it was an 80/100 or a solid B+. We dehydrated it for 3 hours at 160°F, but the really thin pieces are a tad overcooked and hard to chew. The texture still isn't exactly like jerky, but they're soft and tender and still pretty good. The flavor is really good too. Just a little bit tangy, not too spicy.
Having jerky on hand is great for when your traveling, we are storing ours in the fridge but with proper preparation you can keep these in baggies and eat them whenever and wherever. A good road food, and knowing its made with quality ingredients and meat its worth the effort making.
It was a good experience making some, and we had fun while doing it. A project @lovely.logic and I did together. We sourced some meat from our local farm store where we get quality meat. Probably better meat than what you would find in pre-packaged jerky.
We start off gathering our ingredients for the sauce. Using a mix of garlic powder, pink salt, onion powder, a lemon, coconut aminos, gochujang sauce and kimchi hot sauce. All of this should give it a sweet but spicy flavor and really be a good addition to the recipe.
It all gets mixed in a measuring cup. And then we will pour it into a plastic storage bag to let it soak.
Here is our cut of beef that we will use for our jerky.
Slightly freezing it makes it easier to cut and holds up better for thin slices.
We cut it in half so it does not take up so much room on our little cutting board. Handling the cold meat was getting hard near the end as it makes your hands real cold. And theres really no way to hold them otherwise.
Cutting as thin as possible while still keeping a good shape for the jerky, we cut across the grain.
A pile starts forming, and soon they will be marinated in the sauce.
The dog wanted some of what we had thats for sure.. haha she got some fatty scraps later on.
All bagged up its ready for the sauce mix to be added.
It will soak for about six hours, partially cooking the meat.
Afterwards it goes into the dehydrator for many hours to finish the cooking process.
All the of slices are lined up on different levels of the dehydrator. Time to cook them.
And after many hours of drying they are ready for consumption.
Looks just like what you get in a package! I would not be able to tell the difference.
We store them in glass dishes so we can enjoy them at our leisure. For a first time it came out great, looking forward to making jerky with extra meat in the future from different kinds of animals. For now we just tried beef but I think pork and maybe lamb would be tasty too. But for now we will enjoy what we made, will probably last a week or so. And then maybe we will give it a try again with some other meat.