How to Smoke Beef Jerky: Insights and Methods from Professional PitMasters #Jerky #smokehousebayou

Hey guys, I'm Brian, I'm coming to you from Smokehouse Bayou International Headquarters here in Ocean Springs, it's early in the morning, it's around 6:20. I need another cup of coffee, but hey, what I want you to do is we're going to shoot. A video today on how we get

smoke

d with UB Turkey, our online orders have skyrocketed, we've shipped

jerky

to all 50 states and our YouTube channels are growing and look, we just like to share how we do things with you and when you get that bag. of

smoke

house, you'll know exactly how it was made and I think that's special for the people you know, it gives them an idea of ​​the item that they're enjoying, in this case, the

beef

jerky

that they're enjoying, so stay tuned anyway.

I'm going to grab a cup of coffee, we'll be right back and we'll smoke some jerky tonight and have a good time cast iron smoked cast iron hey guys, when you're making world-class

beef

jerky, it all comes down to a few things: your marinade, your meat and its smoking method or dehydrating method or whatever book we're smoking jerky here at the Bayou Smokehouse so look I'm going to go over one of our basic marinades that we use on our smoked jerky. Obviously I will also give you the ingredients that are in the bag of our jerky.

I'm not going to go into our exact recipe, but I can tell you this, you know, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and brown sugar make the world go round. to the south because you have that balance between sweet and spicy and hey, down here we like garlic. Well, anyway, those are three basic elements of our ingredients, also salt and sugar, and I want to teach you something about dried bacon. Well, I was in a USDA. facility in Ohio this was probably about two years ago and the owner of the facility asked me what the water activity is in his jerky and I'll explain to him what that means.

Okay, water activity is if you think about it when we're. dehydrating the meat or smoking the meat so that the meat is shelf stable where it's actually considered jerky, okay you have to reduce the water activity to a specific level and I'll go into all those numbers or whatever I guess I'll do in this story just a little bit, but you're reducing the water activity, which is part of the process of stabilizing and making it really jerky, so the guy tells me what your water activity is in your jerky and I said 0.68 and he laughed and he said you mean 0.86 which means he thought it had a higher water content and I said no according to the state of Mississippi and then he cemented that there is no way you have activities that low and your jerky is that tender, so he had a machine there where they can actually grind the jerky and do a quick test and test the water activity and in his machine he came back to point six nine, which is very close to what I had told him and he was impressed, so this is the most tender jerky I have ever tasted and I can't believe the water moves so much further down in my jerky;

In other words, not only was it storage stable, it was table stable. That jerky could sit on the table for 30 days and then it will still be fine, so the ability to have a very low water activity and still have a tender turkey depends on a couple of things and let's say it could be jerky 101, but we're probably going to get some 201 or 301 jerky in this, but when you smoke the jerky, if you want tender jerky, let's go with a thicker cut of meat, okay, to start, you're going to cut it about a quarter of an inch or a little bit thicker and then you will also need to use enough salts or salt and sugars, whether it's brown sugar or just regular white sugar cane sugar, what happens there is that when you use it in your marinades or in your condiments it competes for the water, it draws the water out of the meat, okay? so you don't have to make super hard, crispy jerky, you know, some people like that kind of jerk, you know, I'm not ruling it out, but you don't have to make that super crispy thin jerky that's really tough after three pieces in your mouth.

I always say it hurts my jaw, you know, eating that jerky to get the low water content or activity so it's shelf stable, you don't have to do that, you can go for a thicker cut of meat, but you're You'll need to use enough salt and sugar in your marinade for that to happen, okay, we do it here, we use enough. I always tell people that you know you could have a great marinade or a great condiment, but don't be afraid. I'm afraid to use enough of it, okay, and that's very important anyway. I'm going to go over the base of our or one of our marinades here and you can try this at home.

You can check the different quantities just to make it to your liking. so you're tasting, I know different parts of the country are just not used to the explosion of flavor that we have here in the south and a lot of times it's like, wow, this is so tasty and that's what we want. to do with our jerky, it doesn't take any talent to make a jerky so spicy that you can't eat it well, but when you try our jerky I want you to be able to taste all the different ingredients that are in it and I think that's a characteristic of class jerky world, you enjoy it more, so anyway I have seven ingredients that we use in the jerky marinade or in this particular jerky marinade and they are very, very basic.

I told you we started. with garlic powder, that's what I have here and I'm obviously making enough marinade to make. I think you would probably marinate about 72 pounds of meat, okay? because our marinade mix is ​​four pounds of meat for every 1 pound of marinade, now look. Don't get caught up in the word adobo, many times people say well it's a liquid, you're absolutely right, I've always missed it, they call it adobo, even though that's all you know, it's not liquids we're using, but what? that? What you'll find later in the video, you'll see that as the meat drops towards the end of the seasoning, it all becomes liquid anyway, so I always refer to this as manually, so if you want. leave me a correct comment, okay, it's not a big deal, you know, it's like when you know you're doing something wrong but you keep doing it anyway, are you saying something wrong?

Look, you have to put, you have to use enough salt, etc. we put a good amount of salt in there, okay, this is actually going to be about seven pounds of brown sugar. I'm going to throw that right in there, a little bit of black pepper, just to balance that out there, so you can think. about that an ounce of black pepper and enough to marinate 72 pounds of meat that's not a lot of black pepper a little cayenne I said garlic, cayenne and brown sugar make a good balance but look I think it's the Scoville Units or whatever and peppers is the way they measure peppers the change in cayenne pepper is like twenty two thousand to forty four thousand anywhere there is acceptable or whatever so you can imagine it's a big change so if you're doing if you make a marinade or a seasoning and you have it on the low end twenty five thousand scovilles or twenty to twenty five thousand Scoville and then the next batch you get is 44 there's really no way to know until you use it but sometimes it shows, that's why there is a variation in the spice level.

I guess when you use cayenne we'll use a little bit of sugar. Now obviously we have all these measurements and then we use them memorized because we've done thousands of smokes with it and then the last thing I'm going to use and I'm so pretty that sneezing or whatever our salt cure is fine and in this amount of marinade to make that much meat I only used about three ounces of this you don't need more, but hey, if you're a jerky maker and you want to learn about jerky, we talk about the water content or the water activity in the meat, which is one part of storage stability, the second would be the type of bag you put your jerky in, okay, the third would be an oxygen absorber that you put in that bag that would reduce oxygen like oxygen from water or not to your friends when you try to make shelf-stable meat, okay? then the fourth thing would be a healing salt or some kind of preservative or whatever, okay, a lot of jerky they say they don't use that plain stick, although they will use celery powder or something, instead we use this, excuse me, we use This pink healing salt works great for us and is something you can find online or you can also find it at Academy Sports.

I mean, we shop at Academy a lot because it's local here, so that stuff helps your idiot. What I'm telling you, those four things right there will help your jerky from growing a beard. You don't want to look in a bag and see a beard in your jerky. Okay, and if you do those four things right, your jerky won't grow a beard on that important machine every month we don't like our idiot you don't use fancy jerky yeah, we've had clean facial jerky for years we don't put the beard on our idiot you know just remember that okay so we've got our marinade mixed now I'm just going to mix it by hand and then we'll throw it in time and let it stir a little bit then the next step is to get the meat right and get these two together, so stay tuned, we took the marinade out of the timer out of the glass, so now it's all well mixed and ready to put it with this meat, but look, when we start, you know, like at home, we cut everything by hand . of our I browned it, that's the cut we use, we cut everything by hand to make the jerky, then we go to a hand crank slicer and I'm going to put a car to appear in this video that has another video that shows that device. and something we picked up at Academy Sports is a winner, I think it's the name of the product and basically you just drop the meat in there, turn the thing on and it creates great slices of jerky that, man, we'd cut thousands of pounds off.

We went through those things and it worked out very well. I think it was $99, top nine bucks. We spent a lot of time and got that. Then we went to a big commercial slicer, you know, a big ten thousand dollar slicer that we cut all the raw jerky on. or rodeo to make beef jerky, then we would have to tear that thing down completely, clean it to the eighth degree so we can use it when it comes off the smoker to cut the cooked side or the cooked meat, you know, on that tear. After the cleaning process, you'll see that slicer in a moment, you know it was just a big, drawn-out thing, so finally, searching around we found a meat supplier, a USDA supplier in Omaha, and we basically bought our meat already cut . crosscut creates a very good product for us, we are very happy to have it, it costs a little more per pound to have the job already done for you, but it drastically reduces the amount of time we have to cut and then just the major cleanup that comes and when we started cutting the median it already saved me entire afternoons of time, so I'm very, very happy that we made that change and Michelle will come and show you how the process works. with how the meat goes in and what we do from there, so look at this, that's not a knife.

Hey guys, Brian told you how we get the median, this is what it looks like when we get it, it comes in these bundles like this. ten pound packages are perfectly pre-cut meat and we love it, we just like to separate them so the marinade covers all sides of the meat, it's not a big clump as that doesn't work well, I don't want to separate them and we add marinade as needed that we advance or season as we go, how long are they going to be hanging around to make sure that the marinade is good on that meat?

We like to rotate it for between 45 minutes and an hour. I prefer an hour. just to make sure it's all really well covered and it's good and runny and it's a better product, so one thing about that glass, tell them about the vacuum capability, yeah, a little bit of vacuum to vacuum seal it and it cuts where we used to. . This in errors, I think they are called and we had to let the meat sit for two days to marinate and we can do two days of work in one hour, which has saved us a lot of time, saves many times.

There is a lot of work, we have to wash all those loads, we would have like 30 terminals in the cooler and the man just imagined taking the meat out and then having to wash all of that to be able to go straight from the drum. For the smoker that saved us a ton of time, so everyone can see the shale is just going to separate, like she said, about 40 pounds of meat and with that we're going to use 10 pounds of our seasoning and that's our ratio. and anyway, then we'll put it in the glass, let Tyrone do his thing, yeah, and then you know, he'll go to the smoker.

Thanks, Sal. I love it, that's what I was like as sailors. July Alicia comes down, she's fine after we meet at the glass. Shayla will turn it on and create a vacuum that opens the pores of the meat and causes the marinade to enter the meat as if it were there for a couple of days after the vacuum is established. We begin the turning process which ensures all the meat is well seasoned. Hey guys, while we're at it, we'll load up the smoker here in a moment and we'll go ahead and put some wood in the water.

Look, we buy a lot of our wood at Academy. I know I've mentioned Academy several times in this video. I need those guyspay me, but look, we bought this B&B, they sell a good variety and today we are going to smoke. with Pacala we're going to make our smoking gun, so I'm going to go ahead and grab, you see, they cut these pieces where they fit nicely on our smoker. I'm going to go ahead and grab some pieces, we like to soak them in water for about 20 or 30 minutes while we load the smoker, so we always run out here and do this before we start loading, let's go back inside, okay, we already removed the jerky. the glass now we're going to take it and throw it in this busboy and load the smoker and this jerky has been spinning for about 50 minutes and as we explained, she has the empty glass and the 50 minute spin is roughly equivalent to two days. be in the marinade, so we're not going to sit here and make you watch us unload everything, but we're going to load up some of this turkey and talk just for a second here, a star in the background, can we?

Go on, we're using a Southern Pride 500 which is one of the best smokers for restaurants, it's a rotisserie counterpart smoker and today we're going to smoke it with hickory wood, but hey, there's no soul, there's no sawdust here, there's no smoke generators. smoke in a smokehouse. This is to put in a propane assistant wood smoker and it smokes as good as any smoker in the world so we are very excited to have this and it will hold about 60 pounds at a time and it will take us about 30 minutes to get to the loaded smoker as well that we're going to keep doing Misha Lila much faster than me Miss Sassy, ​​you don't mind telling him that I talk a lot once he orders the line, so anyway that's exactly right and look, this is it. idea of ​​this video we want everyone to see behind the scenes exactly what's going on so when you get your bag of smoke cops you can see what it was like, we don't grow our jerky for other people to make. and put our name on it look who makes it it's made with love I want to buy you buy this tooth here soon anyway she's already cracking the whip okay we've got the smoker loaded let's light up this baby puppy put the little tip for me Please, it will be enough to cut the propane into two logs at once and this is again this economy.

Proper humidity is vital in the smoking process. Now we're going to set the smoker to 190. Hey guys, we're back, these burgers. goes about three hours at 190. I'll check it now and see if it's ready to accelerate. What's that? How do you turn off your timers? Because it's time to check it out. We're going to keep going, so let's increase it. up to 260 early once it gets to 260 we'll cut it and we'll cut it hey why don't we want to get the 260? Well, 260 brings us to our leaf bowl with Cobra, it's a lethal step in the hasip. plan, yeah, well, actually we've probably already taken the lethal step, but this is the extra lethal step that ensures that any kind of bacteria that multiply, anything that's a little bit small and you can't see, will die properly and then The second reason is that the marinade is the most delicious in this city, we call it the burning point, so you want to go just below the burning point and that will make the marinade the most flavorful and that is what sets the smokehouse apart Bayou of any big name jerky that you find in a store because their smokehouses only go up to 175 to 180 so they can't reach that step that we do in this smaller smoker so take advantage of the chance to buy a smokehouse for having the pride southern and that's what we are. one of the reasons why our method is different from everyone else on the market.

I have never met another smoke master. Our

pitmasters

who did what we do get up to 260 60 per check in the interview here. Yes, hello guys, we are at 260. The ramp process is finished. Shayla is not going to come in with the camera. You will hear the sizzling of the jerky. That's the difference between your smokehouse and any other jerky on the market. They cannot raise your smokehouses below 185 degrees. that's what makes the difference with our marinade so come see this no, you have to when you open the smoker you can see the smoke in your face.

I'll shut up, you listen to that system, it's not like, thank you, smoke. down, spy, idiot, he's the only thing that makes bacon jealous, I don't know if you knew that or not, okay, so what we're going to do is let this rotisserie out, it'll cool down a little bit and then I'll bring that slicer here and I'll start cutting it and then Michelle will show you how to pack it. Okay, the smoking process is over. The jerky is ready. It's still pretty hot. It's not a bit hot. The best time to cut it is now. so let's turn on the o F 19, this thing makes quick work and you'll see how we cut this jerky up into little pieces so miss Sheila can hit, that's the smoked nut right there man that's so pretty.

Look, we're going to finish cutting this and then shave, let's step back a little bit, we'll show you the final process and you'll have had a really good virtual tour of Smokehouse Bayou and how we make the jerky that you guys love. We love doing this, so anyway let me finish cutting this and then we'll go to the bagging section. We cut the jerky for ourselves. I'm going to show you how to bag a bag. I'm the last person to touch your jerky. before it ships and just so you know, when you order a bag, I will write you a little personal note on each one.

I get a personal note written there thanking you for your order and the Andy fries there are amazing. Say our trick with love, each piece is quality controlled by yours truly, so to speak. Thanks because I'm picky, but there's your bag of jerky, that's how it's done, it's that simple. Hey guys, I know this video could have been a little longer. I expected it, but I want you to know that we took our time, we tried to be as thorough as possible, we wanted you to go to get a good indication of how jerky is made, but also if you wanted to learn how to make jerky then we would have given you information valuable and hopefully we would have saved you some time and effort as you continue making jerky or whatever and otherwise your sub is focused on you and we have the option to order six items.

Shipping is free and we also make a bag and send it to a deployed active duty member or veteran in their honor, so that's our way of giving back. We are veteran owned and love our veteran and active duty military personnel, so anyway, thank you. Coming to Smokehouse Bayou, we look forward to hearing from you, and if you're ever in Ocean Spray, feel free to come join us and visit the international headquarters.