I took a deep dive into our chest freezer last week, inventorying as I went. It's too easy for things to get lost in the bottom depths.
Which is why I was surprised to find four five-pound bags of solid beef, left over from the last cows we butchered before we moved. Twenty pounds! The butchers had pulled these extremely lean chunks aside (at our request) for beef jerky. After the chaos of moving, we forgot all about them.
Don loves beef jerky. He immediately pulled out two of the bags, ten pounds of meat, to make into his favorite treat.
After (mostly) defrosting it, he realized the meat wasn't sliced. So he got to work cutting it thin. I hadn't planned on turning this project into a blog post, so I didn't think to get a photo of the slicing process. Suffice it to say he kept the knife very sharp. (It also helps to slice the meat when it's still slightly frozen.)
After slicing, he marinated the beef in two different sauces (one was a basic sauce made with Worcestershire and soy sauce, the other was mostly the same except he used teriyaki). He marinated each bowl of meat in the fridge for about ten hours.
We have two dehydrators, but he opted to just do one batch at a time. He started with the regular jerky.
Before putting the meat on the trays, he sopped up the extra liquid with towels. (Good thing they're washable.) On some of the slices, he sprinkled red pepper flakes for a bit of extra zing.
The meat can be touching, but is not supposed to be overlapping on the trays.
He set the dehydrator up on a table on the porch and set it at 165F for six hours.
It took, oh, about ten minutes for the yellow jackets to find it. We were swatting at the nasty beasts for the duration of time the meat was dehydrating.
When the first batch was finished...
...he transferred the meat to cookie sheets and baked it at 275F for about 10 minutes, until the meat was sizzling. This "finishes" the drying process and renders the meat safer.
This is the first batch. Now double the quantity (after the second batch was done) and that's a lotta snacks! He got about three pounds of jerky from the original ten pounds of meat.
Interestingly, Don had just purchased a bag of jerky a couple weeks ago. The bag cost about $5.
This bag contained the curiously precise amount of 2.85 oz.
This meant three pounds of this commercial beef jerky would cost about $84. We calculated the cost of making three pounds of our own (from our own beef) was about $35 (based on original butchering costs, electricity costs for running the dehydrator, and ingredients for the marinade).
But of course since we paid for the butchering many years ago, essentially the batch was free. Hard to beat that price.
By the way, a yellow jacket somehow made it into the dehydrator and got dehydrated itself. I found it when I was washing up the trays.
Look at the stinger on that critter! No wonder they hurt.