Cooking Spotlight: Jerky

A time-honoured staple of the Trueblood household is homemade jerky! Here's some insight into how we make it.

The big picture is that we take small strips of meat and marinade them overnight, then dry them out in the oven with relatively low heat for several hours. Convection ovens work great for that, or if you can blow a fan to circulate air to speed up the drying, but I've done several batches with nothing but the door propped open in an electric oven.

To start with, we select beef or a similar meat. We choose lean cuts – we want to avoid fat! We'll trim off any fat we do find.
Shortly before prepping the marinade, you can toss the meat in the freezer until firm (not frozen solid!) for easier handling. This is especially helpful for thinner cuts.

You will also need a way of propping the oven door open to dry out the air. Preferably you use one of those oven drying magnets that keeps the light off, like this:

Then comes the BBQ marinade. I use an imitation recipe for the marinade concentrate we had growing up (Woody's Cook-in sauce):

2 tbsp water
2 tbsp canola oil
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp dark molasses
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
3 tbsp liquid hickory smoke
2 cans (6 oz each) tomato paste
1/2 tbsp onion powder
1/2 tbsp garlic powder
1/2 tbsp black pepper (ground)
1/2 tbsp paprika or dark chili powder
1 tbsp salt
Stir into a pot and simmer

Once the marinade is ready, you can start prepping the jerky the night before you plan to cook it:

Then refrigerate overnight, or longer if you want.

When ready, lay out strips above a tray on a rack. You want air beneath them!

If all went well, you'll have some dehydrated jerky ready to bag up and take on the trail. (Or to eat within a day, I'm not one to judge).

Good jerky with no fat will keep for quite a while, but, well... good luck trying to resist eating it all!