Making Beef Jerky In an Oven
- Thread starter Mungo
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Evening All,
For the Scottish contingent, some of you way not want to faff around making your own.. but I would advise it... very yummy, there's always John Brash in Corstorphin Road in Edinburgh http://www.johnbrashbutcher.co.uk/south/ either pop in his shop or use mail order it's nice stuff, my mate Bob and I do like it. Meaty goodness you can chew...lol
Opps Belzeebob, gave a rough location allready
TTFN
Goatboy.
For the Scottish contingent, some of you way not want to faff around making your own.. but I would advise it... very yummy, there's always John Brash in Corstorphin Road in Edinburgh http://www.johnbrashbutcher.co.uk/south/ either pop in his shop or use mail order it's nice stuff, my mate Bob and I do like it. Meaty goodness you can chew...lol
Opps Belzeebob, gave a rough location allready
TTFN
Goatboy.
...and for those of you in the Toronto, Ontario region - http://www.florencemeats.com sells (out of Oakville) biltong, droewors, and oodles of boerwors.
Yum!
Yum!
I just made some beef jerky this afternoon using my dehydrator (basically a hairdryer with a few racks) and it is lovely!
The marinade consisted of: soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, a splash of tabasco, a splash of worcester sauce, a few grinds of salt, pepper and garlic salt, and a secret ingredient....a shot of tequila!
To say its "knocking my socks off" is an understatement!
The marinade consisted of: soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, a splash of tabasco, a splash of worcester sauce, a few grinds of salt, pepper and garlic salt, and a secret ingredient....a shot of tequila!
To say its "knocking my socks off" is an understatement!
I make it a lot, usually in batches and baged then frozen ready for the off. A days quantity in a bag and you know where you are, 2 days out and you take 2 bags. Simples...
Whittler Kev
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
Any chance of showing a couple of pics of the dehydrator.
Do you use the hairdryer on "cold" and how long for?
Here is a guide by Lex Rooker for making Pemmican : http://www.traditionaltx.us/images/PEMMICAN.pdf
Here is a guide for making a cheap drier based on a lightbulb and a cheap enclosure:
http://www.traditionaltx.us/images/JerkyDrierInstructions.pdf
Here is a guide for making a cheap drier based on a lightbulb and a cheap enclosure:
http://www.traditionaltx.us/images/JerkyDrierInstructions.pdf
Whittler Kev
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
If you have a butcher or someone with a meat/coldcut slicer. Put the meat in the freezer until it starts to freeze then you can use the slicer set to what ever thickness you want to slice it. Very fast and acurite.
Making jerky in a normal oven plus making jerky with a log burner
God does this stuff taste good!!
I've made a proper jerky rack now to fit the log burner
God does this stuff taste good!!
I've made a proper jerky rack now to fit the log burner
Yes, that's right. Some early explorers in the U.S. died because they took large quantities of lean meat with them not knowing the importance of fat. If you increase the amount of protein in the diet, you also need to increase the amount of fat to help with its metabolization or you get depleted in vitamin A, which is very dangerous.
Whites had to learn the proper thing to do from the Indians. Now it seems we have to learn such things all over again with the current stupidity over low-fat diets. U.S. dietary guidelines are effectively based on the economic needs of American agribusiness (which grows and processes acre upon acre of maize ("Indian corn")) and British guidelines are based on U.S. ones, and here we are ...
In point of fact, it's not fat in the diet that's the problem (apart from unnatural synthesized vegetable fats marketed by agribusiness) but sugar. That's what responsible for the obesity epidemic (and a lot of other health problems) as explained here by Pobert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
A must watch for anyone who's got kids, and a searing indictment of the American food industry.
I'm not sure that they add much in that way, but they were certainly put in for the flavour, and they may have tended to help preservation:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kFOw3koWpJ0C
Important from the point of view of vitamins would be the fat-soluble ones (particularly A and D), which were in the added fat. Fat is also important for a number of other biological functions. It was found the past that pemmican was the only concentrated food on which men can actually live and work for extended periods.
In general, you can -- sorry conventional "wisdom" -- survive on a totally carnivorous diet, and several peoples did for at least part of the year. However, you do need to know which parts of the carcass to eat (e.g., marrow, adrenal glands for vitamin C), you have to eat some of it raw, and above all you need to eat plenty of the fat.
Myra Shackley in Using Environmental Archaeology is very interesting on this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0713448504/
We know from ethnographic accounts that North American Indians would preferentially use the carcasses of older male animals, because of the greater quantity of fat on them. Often leaner carcasses would simply be abandoned on site. They would also sometimes remove only the cuts high in fat -- liver, tongue, etc. and abandon the rest of the carcass. Archaeological evidence, such as that from the Garsney Bison Kill site in Canada, shows us the same thing:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Z7XGFSp3drkC&pg=114
This stuff you hear about primitive peoples' using everything on a carcass is a load of bull from ill-informed people who project modern Western obsessions onto them. Hunter-gatherers may have had a use for all parts of an animal; but they didn't always use them. It's modernized resource-starved societies that worry about "waste" -- hence Samuel Hearne's strictures on the "wastefulness" of the Canadian Indians.
This is highly informative on the general diet of North American Indians:
http://www.trit.us/traditional_diets/native_americans.html
Anyway, to return to pemmican -- it was, and remains, the perfect concentrated food, but it could go off. The women used to ram it down with sticks in parfleches (and even jump on the parfleches) to try to exclude the air. It was a hit-and-miss affair, but if it worked, it would keep for a long time.
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Or just buy a dehydrator for £30
http://www2.westfalia.net/shops/hou..._food/dehydrating_/193811-food_dehydrator.htm
http://www2.westfalia.net/shops/hou..._food/dehydrating_/193811-food_dehydrator.htm
I used to do all that faffing around......apple rings on skewers perched on glasses sitting on top of radiators, meat on skewers and the oven door open for hours on end......cleaning the oven was a miserable chore afterwards....outdoors was easier but.....I too recommend the dehydrators 
Pemican might be a traditonal American method of making a long lasting food, but Europe has loads of recipes for sausages, salamis and the like, and they're just meat and fat, and in many cases fruits, mixed and stuff tightly into intestines and stomachs.
It's just really the same thing; a way of keeping food, a way of making it transportable and stopping spoilage.
Jerky by it's very nature doesn't do well with if made with fatty meat, it goes rancid. Yet fat on it's own, does not. And meat cooked and cooled with fat on the surface excluding air and pathogens does not either.
Lots of different methods.
cheers,
Toddy
cheers,
Toddy
Pemican might be a traditonal American method of making a long lasting food, but Europe has loads of recipes for sausages, salamis and the like, and they're just meat and fat, and in many cases fruits, mixed and stuff tightly into intestines and stomachs.
It's just really the same thing; a way of keeping food, a way of making it transportable and stopping spoilage.
Jerky by it's very nature doesn't do well with if made with fatty meat, it goes rancid. Yet fat on it's own, does not. And meat cooked and cooled with fat on the surface excluding air and pathogens does not either.
Lots of different methods.
cheers,
Toddy
cheers,
Toddy
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