Except for the most hardcore vegans, nobody doesn’t like beef sticks. Making them yourself out of quality ingredients is stupid-cheap and easy as long as you have the right equipment. In this case, it’s a high capacity jerky gun. This particular one can be had from Amazon for $26.
It’s made from food grade stainless and plastic parts that come apart completely for cleaning and can go into the dishwasher. The barrel holds about 1.75 lbs. of seasoned ground meat and includes stainless steel tips for making flat sticks, round sticks, sausages, etc.
After you season the meat (recipe below), you simply load it into the gun (using the included tamper to make sure there are no air pockets), screw on the selected tip, and extrude like you’re using a caulk gun. (Pro tip: Food-handling blue gloves are your friend here.) It takes me less than 15 minutes to process 3 lbs. of meat onto racks, which is a fraction of the time it took me to do that with a meat grinder attachment for my KitcheAid stand mixer.
The best way to cook it is to smoke it at a low temp (160F) for about four hours. Pellet smokers make this easy: just set and forget.
If you don’t have a smoker, I’ve also cooked them in a convection oven (set as low as you can go, with the door cracked with a wooden spoon handle or similar) and with a food dehydrator. If you go that route, you may want to add 1/4 tsp of smoke flavoring.
There are tons of seasoning recipes out there, but this is the house one of Casa de Bonham . . .
Combine meat and seasonings (I use a Kitchenaid stand mixer, but you can mix it with your food-grade gloved hands if you want), and then extrude onto racks. Smoke or cook until they’re flexible, but not brittle…usually 3 to 4 hours in the smoker, longer in a dehydrator/oven. In an oven or dehydrator, you may want to periodically blot off the grease with paper towels. Let the sticks cool and then store in the refrigerator in a ziplock bag.
You can, of course, substitute other lean meats like venison, elk, moose, antelope, buffalo, etc.
In theory, these should last several months if kept refrigerated. At Casa de Bonham, however, they’re always gone long before then.
Now that you exposed a high capacity meat gun, some anti-gun idiot politician will be telling us how its the leading cause of death among child meat eaters.
Since COVID pushed SCOTUS to change their SOP to stream audio of the arguments in real time (before then, the ONLY way to hear the argument in real time was to be at the Courthouse, either in the Courtroom or the Attorney’s Lounge), the necessity to go the DC and wait in line in order to get a scoop is no longer present. So no, I won’t.
I’ll talk to DZ, but hopefully we can do something like we did (over at TTAG) for the Bruen argument: live-stream the audio and have me and another attorney or two providing real-time commentary.
Now I’m hungry…
Why lean? Fat is good.
I agree that fat is good (I process my own lard from pigs I get every year), but not for jerky — it’ll go rancid MUCH faster.
If one does the convection oven thing, it that on a wire mesh rack on say a cookie sheet?
You want airflow, so maybe a wire rack on the top oven rack with a cookie sheet (to catch the grease drips) on a lower oven rack.
Now that you exposed a high capacity meat gun, some anti-gun idiot politician will be telling us how its the leading cause of death among child meat eaters.
😁
LKB – By any chance are you planning on attending the SCotUS ‘Frames and receivers’ oral arguments this fall?
Since COVID pushed SCOTUS to change their SOP to stream audio of the arguments in real time (before then, the ONLY way to hear the argument in real time was to be at the Courthouse, either in the Courtroom or the Attorney’s Lounge), the necessity to go the DC and wait in line in order to get a scoop is no longer present. So no, I won’t.
I’ll talk to DZ, but hopefully we can do something like we did (over at TTAG) for the Bruen argument: live-stream the audio and have me and another attorney or two providing real-time commentary.
Someone is a ‘FireFly’ fan.
Adlai Niska is my hero . . . . 😉