Saturday, November 23, 2019

Making Some Beef Jerky

Making some beef jerky this weekend. Weis had a 2-fer special on London Broil, so that's what I bought. It came out to a bit more than three pounds of meat. This is half.




The knife is a Terävä Jääkäripuukko 110 carbon steel model from Varusteleka. It came EXTREMELY sharp. I'll do a follow up post on the knife after I get the chance to use it some more.

I put the meat in the freezer for about a half hour before slicing, which made it firm, which in turn helped in cutting uniform slices about 1/8" thick. The puukko went through it like a hot knife through butter.

After slicing the meat I added the Nesco cure and spices, and now it's marinating in the fridge until tomorrow morning.

It should take about 10 - 12 hours in my Nesco dehydrator tomorrow. Gonna be good.

My plan is to freeze about half the jerky to bring with us when we go upstate for deer hunting in a few weeks. The rest will be for snacks until then.

2 comments:

Paul Hampson said...

I've had better luck with petite sirloin tips, which have been intermittently available for $2.99/lb here. Any part of the round has come out quite tough for me regardless of how close across the grain I sliced it. I've also been using chicken breast frequently and often prefer it. 1 1/2 lb meat will come out to less than 1/3 lb of jerky. I can't see that lasting several weeks even if you can keep the family out of it. I slice mine closer to 1/4" and can get about 1 lb per tray on the Nesco, for which I have 10 trays, which it will handle with perhaps a bit more time. Dried almost to crisp and packaged in freezer bags mine has lasted more than a year, I found an 8 oz package a while back that was almost two years old and it was still fine. I package 4 oz each in sandwich zip-locks, then two of those to a 1 qt. zip-lock, stored in a paper grocery bag room to block light at temperature.

Dave Markowitz said...

Previously I used sirloin. When I went to the market they were out, so I grabbed the LB instead. This batch as done last night. It came out ok but sirloin is definitely better.