JERKY - Recipes and Storage

R

Running Wolf

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How 'bout sharing your favorite jerky recipes? I've recently dried 3 batches, and the best tastin' to me is the Teriyaki with a little liquid smoke and a little brown sugar. Of course, I didn't even know what I was doing! is grinding extra dry jerky to a powder any good? I've never tried that, but heard it is. How would ground jerky be prepared? Soup?

Also, what's in your opinion, the best way to store jerky? I live in very humid Florida. I imagine in different climates jerked meat must be stored differently. I once read something about not storing in a closed container, because of mold. I think they suggested a cloth sack, and to put it in a shoe box. Is that good, or is a Zip Lock bag OK?

Also, can any other meat besides red meat and fish, be dried and/or smoked?

Thanks for your answers and recipes.

 
Hi Running Wolf, you are lucky that you have this beautifully tasting Jerky. I travelled 4 weeks with family in the USA in 98 and man one thing the four of us liked was Beef Jerky. We tried lots of different tastes and yes I like the TeriYaki taste and the hot/smoked taste the best.

I only wish I could buy Jerky in Holland (Europe) but I've never ever found it in any shop over here. So Wolf man if you want a consumer test done on your home brewed Jerky just let me know and I'll email you my address
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Have a merry Christmas and a verry happy and tastefull New Jerky Year
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Cheers, Bagheera


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For your extra dry jerky you have try crumbling it up and adding it to melted fat to make pemmican. I have several recipes at home, they are easy to find and easy to make. It wont win many gourmet taste contests, but when it is cold and you are hungry pemmican can be a mans best friend. It is one of the original foods used by many polar travelers for that very reason.

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Lee

LIfe is too important to be taken seriously. Oscar Wilde
 
MichLee is absolutely right. Pemmican is wonderful wilderness and survival food. You can eat it by itself, make it into soup, or serve it along with other foods, such as grasshoppers fried in sesame oil with some nice hot chili peppers. The basic recipe is: Take dried meat, dried fruit, and fat. Mash the ingredients together to a consistency that lets you mold the pemmican into forms. Eat. Yum!

Here is some slight elaboration.

-- Powder your dried meat. You can do this by pounding it with rocks or grinding it in a food processor, depending on how primitive you are.

-- You can use any kind of dried fruit you want -- raisins, dates, figs, dried apricots, dried apples, dried cherries, dried cranberries. Chop or grind them until they are just lumpy enough for texture.

-- The best kind of fat to use is tallow made from beef fat. Tallow is fat with all the water removed, so it does not go rancid. You can use lamb fat, but not pork fat, because pork fat doesn't set when cooled. You can probably get beef fat for free from the butcher. You make tallow by heating the chunks of fat in a heavy skillet over low heat. Skim the rinds off the surface, and keep heating until all you have left is liquid, which you can pour off and strain. Set tallow has the color and consistency of candle wax. You can even burn it like a candle. I have heard of using coconut oil instead of tallow but I have not tried it. If you are a fanatically weight-conscious backpacker, who cuts the handles off your toothbrushes and the margins off your maps, you can mix the dried fruit and meat with *butter powder* and then add water to make pemmican soup when you are on the trail. A person less tolerant than I am would consider this heresy.

-- You can add unsalted nuts and honey if you wish. Do not add salt.

-- Add liquid tallow -- not hot but warm enough to be liquid -- slowly to the meat and fruit, until it is just saturated -- oh, say, the consistency of sausage meat.

-- Mold the pemmican into a casserole dish, pie plate, or cupcake forms, or into waterproof bags, and let it harden. It will last forever. If you do not eat it, your grandchildren will.

You can experiment with different combinations of meat and fruit. The process of experimentation is pleasant.
 
Here is the jerky recipe I use.

Make a brine with

1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup salt
1 cup each soy sauce, teriaki sauce, wine
juice of one orange and one lemon
pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, hot pepper sauce to taste

Or a simple brine of

½ cup each sugar and salt
1 qt water

Remove the fat, and cut the meat into strips no thicker than ½“. Cut across the grain for crumbly jerky, with the grain for chewy jerky. Soak the strips in the brine at least overnight. Then put them in a smoker or oven and dry until hard.

I usually store jerky in ziplock bags in the freezer.

Hard curing of meat is not done much anymore. Jerky may be the single exception. But it still works.

A number of years ago when I had no job, my wife, infant son and I lived in an old logging camp in the forest. I shot a deer, but found that only a small portion of the meat would fit into the little freezer at the top of our refrigerator. We cut the rest of the meat into strips and slabs, some as much as 3” thick. Then we rubbed the meat down with salt. The salt draws a lot of the liquid out of the meat, and the salty solution drips off.

We strung clothesline around our wood stove, and hung the meat off the clothesline. Newspaper covered the floor to catch the drippings. We would rub more salt into the meat whenever necessary. Frequently at first, but less frequently as the meat dried and cured. The meat finally dried into hard wood-like lumps.

In order to eat the meat you pretty much had to boil the **** out of it. But it lasts a long time. In fact it never did spoil. Some boring insects got into some of it a number of years later, and drilled little holes through it, but it was still good to eat.
 
If you want the "crem dela crem" Marinate the meat strips in huckleberry juice over
night. The only problem with this is you
won't eat jerky any other way after this.
If your looking for beef jerky to buy you
won't find any better than Hi-Country beef
jerky made in Lincoln Montana. You can order
direct or they do have outlets. They may even
have a web sight.they do have a web sight but
somone screwed it up. to get a brochure e-mail :mt@hicountry.com.

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http://www.imt.net/~goshawk
Don't walk in tradition just because it feels good!!!!!
Romans 10:9,10
Hebrews 4:12-16
Psalm 91



[This message has been edited by goshawk (edited 23 December 1999).]
 
Can't wait to try makeing Pemmican.
Thanks for all the advice on Jerky.
Good Thread Running Wolf.
Anyone know how to make Turkey Jerky,Obviously you use cooked Turkey right?.
Also for fish Jerky do you use it cooked or raw?.
I always wondered if you could get sick from Jerky but never have.Does drying Kill any possible Ecoli or the likes?.
Thanks
Jeff
 
Jeff,

I’ve never heard of cooked jerkey.

When I was in the Aleutians I saw the native Aleuts drying fish by hanging them outside on lines. They sort of dried in the wind. It was often foggy or rainy, but the fish seemed to hang outside most of the time.

You can use the same recipe I gave for jerky to smoke raw salmon or other fish. Vary the time in the smoker to get the dryness you want. You can get it pretty hard if you wish, and it will keep quite a while if it’s hard.

Who knows what happens to the germs. E. Coli usually lives in intestinal tracts or feces. I suspect you may find more in store-bought hamburger than in properly processed wild fish or game.
 
Jerky is relatively low in microorganisms (bacteria), not because of the drying but because of the amount of salt added. Many cultures of bacteria are shipped around the country as freeze dried cultures so drying only holds most bacteria in suspended animation, sort of, until rehydrated. Since you mostly eat jerky still in it's dried state, you only consume the dried bacteria and your stomach acid and digestive enzymes usually does them in. Summer sausage and cheese are frequently made with these dried cultures. It's the salt that prevents bacteria from growing. Although there are a few salt loving bacteria strains, most can't stand the high salt concentration of dry cured meats.

Bruce Woodbury
 
Alternate meats...

Personally, I'd cook poultry before drying it. But that's me personally. I'd be carefull with store bought fish, but no more than I would for any other purpose. (I eat sashimi, jerky's gotta be better...) I would also cook pork were I interested in drying it first...

Oh, and when the recipe says trim the fat, trim _all_ the fat. They ain't kidding...
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Stryver
 
Try vacuum packing. These machines are easy to come by (Cabela's and even Wal-Mart) albeit a little pricey. I think our machine paid for itself the first week we had it. My wife vacuum packs everything. You are only limited by your imagination. Food, Ammo, Tinder, Socks, etc., etc.
 
Barry,
Sounds like a great idea! How much does the machine cost?
Thanks,

HM

 
HM,

The wife got our machine at Wal-Mart. She said they were about $125. The basic machine in Cabela's is about $200. I've also seen them advertised on TV but I'm not sure of the price(s).
 
Fish is still salt dried. You can usually find salt dried cod fish in a supermarket. To prepare it for cooking, it has to be soaked overnight in water to remove most of the salt. Sometimes it has to be soaked more than once. There is a West Indian(Carribean) recipe that uses salt cod, eggplant, onions, tomatoes, sweet peppers, garlic,and some spices(I like to use Italian seasoning and black pepper). The cod is torn into small strips and it is all cooked together in a saute pan. It goes great with rice. Watch out for the sharp bones!! :-)


[This message has been edited by K Williams (edited 26 December 1999).]
 
Hm I purchased a vaccum sealer from Wal-Mart for $119.99 It seemed to be a better deal than the "As seen on TV for $149.99" but I didnt get all the accessories that were included with the infomercial sealer. By the time I ordered the jar sealer and extra bags it cost me $21.50 more than Wal-Mart (plus shipping) Just wanted you to know and shop carefully. By the way mine works great. It is distributated through the Tila company and they have a website that I found by searching for Tila (a subcompany of Thane International) Hope this helps.
 
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