One of my favourite snack foods is beef jerky. I love the texture and the many different flavours that jerky can be marinated and seasoned in. Sweet, spicy, salty, or smoky, all taste delicious. What I don’t love about beef jerky, is paying around $6 per bag for a fairly small portion. This is why I decided to start looking into making my own beef jerky for the first time.
After some research into various recipes and techniques, making the jerky doesn’t seem too difficult or costly at all. It consists of marinating and seasoning lean steak, and then drying all the moisture from it using an oven or dehydrator, and that’s it.
To begin making my jerky, I went to my local supermarket and picked up a package of flank steak (about two pounds), to use for my meat. You want the leanest meat possible with little amounts of fat so the jerky’s shelf life will be longer and not go bad as quickly. The flank steak was probably around a half inch thick, which is a little too think for beef jerky, so I halved this for 1/4 inch thick flank steaks. These two steaks were cut into smaller pieces that were easier to handle, both with and against the grain for varying textures. If you like more chewy jerky, make your cuts with the grain. For less chewy jerky, cut against the grain. After the flank steak was all cut up, I put it in a large bowl, and began to add my marinade. I had looked at a couple different recipes online and used parts from each of them as my marinade.
3/4 cup worcestershire sauce
3/4 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon of paprika
2 teaspoons of freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons of red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon of garlic powder
1 teaspoon of onion powder
2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper
After all the marinade ingredients were added to the bowl of steak, I mixed it thoroughly using a spoon trying to make sure all pieces were covered evenly. The bowl was covered with plastic wrap, and placed in the fridge to sit overnight. I had mixed the bowl again with the spoon a couple times during the marinating process to make sure it wasn’t just the bottom pieces that would get most of the flavour. I did it before I went to bed, and again in the morning when I woke up. By the time I went to start the process to begin cooking, it had probably sat for 20 hours in the marinade, and it was almost all soaked up out of the bottom of the bowl.
Before I put it on the racks to bake, I dried each piece between a paper towel to try and remove some of the marinade (this seems counter productive, but the meat needs to dry out in the oven, and this helps out with that big time). Before I had began drying the meat with the paper towels, I set up baking racks over top of tin foil on a metal baking sheet. With the steak on the racks, more moisture is able to escape, and juices fall below on to the foil lining. The towel dried meat was spread out along the racks, and put into the oven for 4 hours, at 175°F.
During the cooking process, I opened the oven to let new air enter, and moist air escape. After 4 hours of cooking, it still wasn’t as dry as I wanted so I flipped it, and cooked it for another hour. This extra hour didn’t seem to do the job so I took the meat out, let it cool on the stovetop, put it in a plastic tupperware container, and into the fridge it went.
Although the meat turned out to be tasty and I do enjoy eating it, it’s not true beef jerky that I had set out to make from the beginning. The reason I say that is because I am not confident enough to put it in a resealable plastic bag and into the pantry, due to the fact that moistures still remains in the meat. I think it was a combination of things that lead to the failure of my first beef jerky attempt; The meat was too thick, I didn’t air out the oven enough, and I could have done a better job removing the marinade from the steak with a paper towel. Although it didn’t turn out quite the way I wanted, I still enjoy the jerky, and am proud of what I made, which I think is the most important part. I would love to try making it again, improving on what I thought set me back.
Please enjoy this video of some clips I complied from my first attempt at making my homemade beef jerky.
Works Cited
John, Chef. (n. d.) Homemade Beef Jerky Recipe. All Recipes Canada. Retrieved from https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/241555/homemade-beef-jerky/
Gourmet, Doc. (n. d.) Doc’s Best Beef Jerky. All Recipes Canada. Retrieved from https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/142948/docs-best-beef-jerky/?clickId=right%20rail0&internalSource=rr_feed_recipe_sb&referringId=241555%20referringContentType%3Drecipe
Jake's HFA4U Blog 