Beef jerky

This project started when Dave brought a biltong-making box from South Africa.  To make either biltong or regular beef jerky, you cut raw beef into strips or pieces, and soak them in vinegar and soy sauce for about 8 hours or overnight.  Then the meat is hung to dry - biltong gets special biltong spices, while beef jerky is usually plain.

Due to my mistake, we made our first biltong batch out of #2 meat (not shown).  All dried meat should be made with the leanest stuff you can find, but #2 is the opposite of lean, which means our biltong came out with great flavor, but super hard texture.  I've had biltong before, and I know it's hard, but not that hard.

These pictures are from the next attempt - beef jerky.  This time we used #6, or false fillet - the cut that resembles tenderloin because it's lean and tender, but it's taken from the shoulder, and is cheaper.  Using the setup pictured above, I dried the beef in an oven.  Diehard biltong guys (I say guys because I've never met a female particularly passionate about biltong) would never do this, but jerky is a more laid back affair.  I saw a recipe for 150-160 F for 10-14 hours, so I set my oven to 70 C, and put it on convection.  Maybe the convection was a mistake, because when I checked on them it was like almost sizzling, which is much hotter than it should be.  I turned it down to the 50-60 range and turned off convection.  Still, I think it was ready in like 4-6 hours.

Weighing the stash.  This is good stuff.