BillSpadea.com

Try This At Home…Really

Posted on May 3, 2016 Updated on May 3, 2016

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!