Anyone make their own jerky? If so what do i need and how do i go about doing it? Any other info is appreciated. Im addicted to it and its not exactly cheap the way i eat it! Any help would be appreciated!
"DAMMIT!!!!! I knew it, I knew it, I KNEW IT!!!!"-Immortal words of The Captain
Jerky is actually pretty easy to make. Everything you need you can get at Walmart. They should have jerky mix there and a jerky gun. Just add ground beef, venison, turkey or whatever you want. Then you can bake it in your oven, but it is alot better in a dehydrator. I use Nesco American Harvest Jerky Spice Works. The package has all the directions you need.
you can get jerky kits and makers at walmart. If your local store doesn't have them, check wally world online.
You could think of government workers like teenagers. You pay them an allowance, but do you get any work out them? They eat the food, put their feet on the furniture and complain loudly whenever they are unhappy.
Dude! Haven't you ever seen the infomercial for the Ronco Food Dehydrator?? That's the stuff!
Yeah, he took the meat, cut it really thin, put in a bunch of soy sauce and other stuff, plus a little liquid smoke (or brown sugar I guess works too) and soaked it for like 10 minutes. Then he put it in the dehydrator, and that was that.
I haven't seen that one in a long time...but I still remember a lot of it!
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If you have a dehydrator then it will come out pretty good but you don't need one. You can use your oven to dry the steak out.
I use Flank Steak, but you can probably use any type you want. Flank seems to be easiest to cut into strips.
I basically take a big slab of flank steak (or two or three, it's good to make a lot at once and you can eat it for like a week straight - you might get the runs though!). I cut it into strips of beef fairly thin (like 1/4 inch wide maybe, but it's up to you). I like to cut WITH the grain of the beef, but some prefer the opposite. Just experiment.
Anyway, once you have a bunch of strips of beef you basically spice it up however you want. Typically I'll use a little garlic salt, minced onions, and pepper. I like to make a "brine" or maranading sauce, but this will have a lot of sodium, here's how to do that:
Get a big huge bowl. In it I like to use soy sauce and worchshester (sp?) sauce. You'll need to experiment with the amounts to see how much you like of each. I like to do more soy than worchester myself. Again, this will be high in sodium so you can always try low-sodium soy sauce (it's not too bad tasting). So, pour in the two sauces into the bowl and sprinkle in a bunch of minced onions, pepper, and whatever else you want (again experiment). Stir it all up. Put all the strips of beef in the bowl and let it all sit there for a while. I actually only let it sit for like 45 minutes at the most but I guess if you wanted it to be really strong you could let it sit longer.
Then just cook it. I have found an outside smoker works best by far. I take shish-ka-bob spears and stick them through the steak, like 10-15 pieces on one stick. I hang them in a smoker and cook them in there. You CAN cook it other ways, like broil it (maybe, never tried that myself though), or even on a foreman grill or on a regular gas grill.
Once it's cooked you can actually eat it like that. It's VERY good this way, but you may want to dry it out. If so you can use, again, a dehydrator, or you can actually use your oven. How? Easy. Get some foil and put it on the bottom of your oven because the steak will drip sauce/juice all over it and get the oven very dirty if you don't do this. After that you basically just hang each stick of steak on the oven racks so they're all hanging there in the oven. Put the oven on a VERY low (lowest) temperature setting and let it sit there for several hours.
Basically you just take a piece out and taste it to see if it's dried out and done or not. If not, let them sit longer.
Really you'll need to experiment and mess around to get it just right and get it all the way you want, but hopefully this description will help you get started!
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by mutantseabass » Fri Jun 23, 2006 8:33 pm 
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