Beef Jerky

I have decided to start making some gourmet salts.  I wanted something easy and not a lot of maintenance or preparation.  I searched all over and found some pretty good recipes not only for salts, but sugars, spices and extracts.  Brewing in my linen closet as we speak is vanilla, coconut, almond and orange extracts.  I can't wait to see how those turn out.  Hopefully all of this will come together before the first week of August, when our local County Fair starts.  So I found a recipe for Citrus Salts, which in theory seemed pretty easy right?  Add a few dried citrus fruits to some sea salt and BLAM! you have citrus salts.  The recipe for drying out fruits in my oven seemed easy enough right, 200° degrees for two hours, easy peasy!  WRONG!  I sliced them way to thin and they burned up, thank goodness fruit is inexpensive.  So as Toby and I were in Walmart, looking to buy out the store to furnish his new house with kitchen and bathroom gadgets and what nots, I came across a food dehydrator.  $42.00, what a steal.  Toby was generous enough to buy it for me. 

The first thing I decided to make in my new little gadget was some jerky.  We don't get to eat a lot of jerky anymore because a lot of the store bought stuff has gluten in it.  It's amazing what you can't have once you start looking at labels.  Stephanie actually teethed on beef jerky, I know that seems a little mountain hillbilly, but she loved it and it was not near as messy as those nasty little cookie things.  Alec of course was super duper excited, he loves the stuff.  The first batch I made he "allowed" me to have a small bag to give to Toby, then the big bag mysteriously disappeared into his black hole of a room.  Oh well, I don't care, I would rather he munch out on beef jerky than garbage.  Which BTW is another bonus of eating gluten free, no cookies, cake, twinkies, ding dongs, etc.

Here is a recipe I found at http://blisstree.com, it's actually really good, but I would beef (no pun intended) it up a little, it could have been stronger in flavor for my tastes.  To make it peppered beef jerky, just sprinkle cracked pepper on it right before you start dehydrating it.  Not too much though, if you use the fine ground pepper, it's just not the same.

Enjoy!

Photo by Kelly Taylor

Beef Jerky

adapted from http://blisstree.com

1 1/2 – 2 lbs. of lean meat

1/4 C. soy sauce (La Choy - gluten free)

1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/4 tsp. garlic powder

1/2 tsp. onion powder

1 tsp. hickory or mesquite liquid smoke-flavoring

Slice your choice of lean meat very thin, about 1/4 inch slices works.  If you slice it any thinner than you get a tougher crispier finished product.  I used a top sirloin roast or a rump roast and trimmed all of the fat off of it.  It was not that hard.  London Broil is a good choice too. 

Put all of the meat in a Ziploc bag, mix all the marinade ingredients together and give it a good whisk.  Pour the marinade into the Ziploc bag with the meat.  Zip it up and really work that marinade into the meat by squishing it around in the bag.  Place the bag in the fridge for several hours.  I let my stay in there overnight, flipping it around a couple of times so the marinade had a chance to coat all of the meat.

Take the meat out of the bag and pat it down with paper towels, you don't want it really wet.  Place it in single layers, NO OVERLAPPING, onto the dehydrator trays.  Allow it to do its magic for at least 5 hours.  I rotated my trays every hour or so and dabbed it a few times with paper towels to remove the meat juice off of the drying pieces.  I didn't have too much of this though because I chose very lean cuts of meat. 

Once the meat is dried to your tastes, place it in airtight baggies and you can store it in the freezer for months.

ENJOY!