Try This At Home…Really
Yes, I’m easily distracted by food and I love to eat. Got a great tip from Paul Porowski, my colleague at Chasing News for a recipe to make homemade beef jerky. And I love beef jerky. I’m also relatively frugal…some say cheap…and to spend $8-9 on a pack of jerky is not something I do often. Over the weekend I followed (most) of the instructions and over a two day period produced some of the best jerky I’ve ever had. More than 100 of you watched the live-stream on Facebook as I made the marinade and prepared the jerky strips for the oven. So for those of you who missed it and want to try this at home – please do – here are the videos and the ingredients:
Start with meat from the supermarket, specifically, a 2-3 pound London broil. Cut the meat into strips, long ways, you’ll see in the video that I started short but the longer strips cames out better. Also, it’s got to be thick enough to have texture, about the thickness of a ‘thick-cut’ bacon slice. Make sure that you have a sharp knife before starting the process. As you’ll see, my wife has much better knife skills than I do so she takes over the slicing about half way through.
Here’s the rest of the ingredients from Paul’s list:
2 10oz Bottles of Worcester sauce, I use Lea and Perrins.
(pro tip, use knife to pop off white cap on inside of bottle, CAREFULLY)
1 10oz Bottle of soy sauce
1 5 oz bottle of tobasco sauce or Texas Pete
1 cup brown sugar
1 medium jar of minced garlic
Handful of chili powder
1 can of beer or 2 cups of favorite whiskey (optional)
2 Handfuls of black ground pepper (optional)
I saved a lot of money buying store brand ingredients instead of the name brands but it’s your call. Also…use the whiskey and add a little bit of cayenne pepper to the mix.
Mix all the ingredients in a bowl or a plastic brining container and place the cut beef in for 12-24 hours in the fridge.
When you’re ready to make the jerky set your oven to 150 degrees – you want to dry the meat not cook it – and place each strip on an elevated rack on a baking sheet in the oven. I used a cookie cooling rack.
Should be done in about 5 hours. Mine took 5 hours and 20 minutes. Next time I may substitute a vinegar BBQ sauce for the soy. If you try it before I do, let me know how it turns out.
Make sure you tweet me pics of the beef Jerky to @billspadea and tag @NJ1015 and @ChasingNews in the tweet.
Enjoy!
May 7, 2016 at 15:37
Bill,
Thank you for the hints and it looks delicious… Can’t wait to try on my electric smoker.