Pam's Jerky

Hello and welcome to Rose Red Homestead. This is a video I've been promising to make for a long time, so I know many of you will be excited to see it when it comes out. Let's learn how to do it. Make

jerky

today according to our family recipe. This recipe has been in our family for years and years and years. The reason I like it is that it's very quick and easy, so we'll get started on this in just a minute. moment, what we usually do when we get ready to make

jerky

, which is usually around Christmas time, I'm a little later this year because I was sick for a while, but we got some really good purchases of boneless roasts and they can pretty much be any type of boneless roast, but this time jim and I went to our freezer and found a couple roasts that have been available for over a year, so we got fined for those roasts, one was just one boneless roast and the other was a boneless top round roast, so we have some pretty good meat to work with now Jim spent some time this morning cutting it into strips.

Generally what we do is when we buy a nice roast at a grocery store and we ask the butcher to cut it into jerky strips for us, which are about an eighth of an inch, but Jim cut them up and they're big and we don't care because jerky is jerky like jerky, so they will have strange shapes and so on. You know, we put esteramine on this counter several times today and I washed my hands, so a lot of times I don't show it in the video, but you should know that we are very, very careful about safety issues with washing our hands. and making sure our countertop is clean before and after we cook the meat, so this is roughly the size these pieces will be.

Now what I'm going to do is in this oversized bowl right here, I'm going to mix up a double. recipe for our marinade and I'll put this recipe in um at the end of the video so everyone can have it and it's as easy as possible so the regular recipe calls for one cup of soy sauce and one cup of Worcestershire sauce. The regular recipe makes enough marinade for three to five pounds of meat and I have seven pounds of meat so I'm going to double the recipe so I'm going to use all the rest and just pour it in. and I need two cups and I have another backup ready to go, but I think it was only two cups, I can't see it very well, two cups on the money, okay, so the next one is two cups of Worcestershire and we need about another . cup, so here's a new one that we just pulled off the shelf, so it's already in place, so we'll put in the rest of the ingredients.

I'm going to start with the dry ingredients because the rest is wet and this requires. for one teaspoon in the regular recipe so I'm going to double it so I'm going to take two teaspoons and these are dried onion chips and I'm not using homemade dehydrated onions I'm using commercial onions because they're really small and that's what we like in our jerky to give it flavor, it's the little chips and then it requires four teaspoons of black pepper, which would be eight teaspoons, which is two more tablespoons, and I can't remove all this stuff, so one tablespoon is three. teaspoons, six teaspoons, it requires a lot of pepper and then two teaspoons, so that's a total of eight teaspoons of ground black pepper and then liquid smoke and I use liquid rice smoke.

Over the years, that's been the one I've discovered I like. the best and requires two teaspoons that were doubled are four teaspoons. I'm just going to make a tablespoon plus a teaspoon, oh, smell, smell and that's it, that's the whole recipe. We're done, I'm going to stir it up. dip the pepper, check the volume to see how much we have, it's still not much above the four cup line, which means that because I've leveled the meat, I have three and a half pounds in each of these bags, I have four cups of the marinade I'm going to put two cups in each bag, the usd allows us to make jerky and they have a special way that they like to see it made and they have a proven recipe, now this recipe is not entirely their recipe.

It has some similarities, but it has enough ingredients and there's a little bit of enough preservative in here that we can put this jerky in our dehydrators. We cannot prepare other meats in the dehydrator, it is simply not safe. um things like burgers or other strips of meat to make now with this marinade is okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is put two cups in each of these bags and that was a little shy. and the rest comes in here now, what's going to be really really important is that this is going to go in the refrigerator overnight and then it's going to be tomorrow morning when we get up before we put this in the dehydrator, but what has to happen? ?

The thing that has to happen with jerky with this marinade is that every piece here has to go into that marinade and because it's all stuck together it can be a little difficult so every so often I'm going to go in and take it out of the refrigerator and put it on the bar just like that and massage it. You could even open it up and rearrange the meat to make sure each piece is coated with this marinade. We'll be able to tell in the morning when we put them on the dehydrator shelves if every part was covered because any part that wasn't will be bright pink and then any part that has the marinade on it will be a darker brown, so hopefully we'll see everything darker brown in tomorrow, so I'm going to put them in the refrigerator and I'll see you in the morning when we're ready to put them in the dehydrator.

The jerky has been marinating in the refrigerator for probably about 16 hours. I double bagged it. for safety reasons and um, I went to the refrigerator half a dozen times in the last few hours and kneaded it like this now we're ready for the next part which is putting it on the dehydrator trays now many of you are asking what kind of do we have a dehydrator, do we have a magic mill, it has six plastic trays and it comes with this little rack on the top and it also comes with three solid trays that you've seen us use sometimes we don't sell anything we don't sell. taking any kind of bribe, um, for anything we do, it's a violation of our personal ethics, to do that, and so on, um, but because we get a lot of questions about what kind of dehydrator we have and I'll show you a little bit more. about that when we put these trays down, so the reason I wear gloves is for two reasons, of course, food safety and cleanliness, and then the second reason is because this marinade gets on my hands and under nails when I do it with bare hands. so I prefer to do it with gloves on, you know when they're all marinated and you can see how dark they've gotten, that's because they've absorbed some of the marinade and we put them on the trays in a single layer, I don't want them to overlap now when hand cuts, at least when we hand cut, we'll have places in the meat that will be thicker than other places like this, it's a pretty thick piece, so we'll probably take them out of the dehydrator um, little by little, as until they are finished, then we will take them out and place them is like doing a puzzle.

Oh, this is going to be wonderful. This has been this recipe that's been in our family for years and years and I used it. make it in packages and then send them to my kids all over the country after they've left home and I haven't done that in a few years but I gave them all the recipes and they all have dehydrators and stuff. they can also do it themselves now, they'll probably take 10 or 12 hours to dry completely and what we want is we want them a little bit flexible, we don't want them so dry that they dry out when we bend them.

They split in half. I'm going to finish putting them in the trays off camera and we'll bring you back when we're ready to put them in the dehydrator. I have six trays ready to go and I have so much meat left. There's probably about three trays left, maybe four trays left, so we're going to do this in two batches, so I'm going to put this back in the double bag in the refrigerator and it'll be perfectly fine to leave another day that I left it. the marinade two three four days at a time when I'm making large quantities, so that's the good thing about this marinade, now the next thing is to transfer it to the dehydrator before doing it, I want to tell you a couple of things that the usda says regarding the jerky um they give us the option it's not recommended so it's not a strict rule but what they say is if we would have put if we would have emptied the bags of meat into a pot and then brought it to a boil and boiled it in the marinade for five minutes, which it's a safer way to remove any potential contaminants and then the other time you can do that as well is after we take it out of the dehydrator.

We can put it in the oven at low temperature and keep it there for a while too and that will ensure a longer shelf life. Ours doesn't last that long, so I'm not too worried about a long lifespan. For these, I make other things with meat, but either way, we're going to put them in the dehydrator, so I brought this little light so you can see inside our dehydrator. I like a box type dehydrator and the fan is on the back wall. provides a fairly uniform heat distribution. I have to come and turn them over with some foods.

Some foods do well, so let's put these last three on the door by sliding them like this and then I'll turn this on now that the temperature. The temperature right now is 158 USDA recommends 140. I make mine on the highest setting which is 158. I want it done quickly to reduce the risk of bacterial contamination. Now in terms of the timer, I'm going to set the timer. for a maximum, um, although it won't go as far that way, it won't stop in the middle. 19 hours and 30 minutes is the maximum on this and I suspect it will be ready in about 10 hours, which would leave us with 10 or 12 hours, which would put us closer to between 8 and 10 o'clock this afternoon, it may not let's bring them back until tomorrow because if I can dry enough and take out, I'll put the other ones in so they last overnight and then We'll have the whole batch ready to show you in the morning, so I'll see you when everything is ready and we're ready to show you the final product.

I got up too early this morning, woke up and couldn't come back. I slept and finally got up at 4am and checked the dehydrator and the last of the jerky was completely finished so I moved it to this bag but I want to show you what it does to my dehydrator trays. It makes a big mess in my dehydrator trays and there are also some drips in the bottom of the dehydrator, so every time I make jerky, I make as much as I'm going to make for a whole year and then I leave it alone because it makes a big mess in my sink over here full of hot soapy water, so I'm going to drop those trays into that hot soapy water and, here's my Clorox.

I really like to clean my trays between batches of food, so I usually just put a little bit of Clorox in That's probably about a quarter to a half cup in my sink and we'll just let them soak while we talk for a couple more minutes and then We'll see how well they work, so when I take them out of the dehydrator I'll put them directly in a plastic bag but I don't seal the plastic bag because they're hot and they create condensation and I want all that condensation to rise and come out instead of staying in the bag. , so let's take a look at some of these to see how they turned out, this was a pretty thick piece, you can bend it, it doesn't break when we pull it apart, it's very dry inside, there's no pink meat, that's exactly what What we want.

Same with this one. this one has some heavier areas so I want to make sure they're set and folded and very brown and not pink and the same with all of them. I may have some that are a little overdone and actually just snap, but you know what those eat too, so one of the things that's happened right now is that one of my kids is staying with us for a few days over winter break and he's doing some repairs on our we have a roof leak that's caused some damage here in the kitchen so he's repairing that well of course that's right next to the dehydrator so yesterday the first one started to run out around the six hour mark and as I returned periodically to check, I kept noticing that there seemed to be pieces missing from some of those trays, he helped himself and continued to do so throughout the day, so what See here is not the total performance of what we actually produced.

Probably double that and it would be about right, so the next question is how do we store the jerky and for how long. The USDA recommendation is not to store it for more than two weeks and it should be consumed within two weeks. Well, we never have. I make it and send it. I tell my children. I have to hide it around here or it'll disappear, so the other day I was rummaging through a kitchen drawer behind the gym and found a bag of jerky that was probably over a year old. It was in a backy exactly like this, it was sealed small, it was a smaller size and of course I could tell it was old,so I opened it up and tried a little bit and it was obviously old, but it was something I would consume in it. in tough times for sure, so you can store it in plastic bags like this one or you can even store it in glass jars or this is a peat p-e-t-e or p-e-t jar that had food in it, I don't remember exactly what it was, maybe crackers something we got at um costco at the bottom of the recycling triangle um you won't be able to see it because it's so faint, but right under the recycling triangle are the letters p-e-t-e and sometimes it would be p-e-t that plastic is food. -Safe plastic and has a screw on lid which is exactly what we like so you could also store jerky in this jar and you could vacuum seal it whether you had the right type of vacuum sealer or not.

I don't have a jar attachment that fits over this so it would have to be the container type or you could put an oxygen absorber in here and it would make it a little longer I think, but be very careful with jerky, it's meat and there may be stains here that are not completely dry. There's a very thick one here, so it's a little pink. I wouldn't say it's raw by any means, but it's not as dry brown as others. parts, so this might be one that we would want to eat right away, so there you have it with jerky, it's something very exciting and fun to make and this recipe is quick and very easy, it takes me very little time to prepare.

To do it, it takes Jim longer if he's cutting the meat, but when we have a picture, a picture that wasn't what I meant, when we ask a butcher to cut the meat for us, it's actually a very easy process and does not require time. We don't consume any and our family loves jerky, but we make a batch and then we eat it, we don't really store it, so thanks for being with us and I'll see you in our next video.