Simple Cooking: Beef Jerky

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Sep 12, 2011 4:00PM

Chuck Sudo/Chicagoist

Our very own Steven Pate celebrated another solar rotation yesterday and his birthday wish to us was to give him some low and slow barbeque action. The two of us, along with Steven's girlfriend, hauled our carcasses up to The Butcher and Larder Saturday for ribs and a nice pound of some pork shoulder, which yours truly smoked for a few hours, no rub necessary.

I also ordered a pound of some of the leanest sirloin I've ever seen in order to make some beef jerky. Beef jerky is so simple to make, it's almost impossible to screw up. The times where people do screw it up are due to impatience. Like barbeque, the secret to jerky is in the wait.

You want to take the cut of meat you're using for jerky (Butcher and Larder's sirloin tip is a perfect cut) and throw it in the freezer for a couple of hours. This firms up the cut and makes it easier to slice.

When it is ready to slice, take the meat out of the freezer and, using a very sharp knife, slice the meat with the grain into minimum 1/16th-inch strips, probably no thicker than 1/8-inch. That's a slice thick enough for the meat to retain that chewy texture that is indicative of a good jerky.

For a marinade, you can do anything. The constant is to add some form of salt to aid in the dehydration of the meat. You can soak the strips in a simple brine solution. What we used for the jerky in the photo was a marinade of:

2/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
2/3 cup dark soy sauce
2 teaspoons fresh cracked black pepper
1 teaspoon harissa spice
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Your marinade time may vary, so long as you give the salt time to work its way into the meat.

Once it's ready for drying, you can lay the strips out on a dehydrator or on an oiled pan and placed in an oven set to 165 degrees. Let the meat dehydrate anywhere between two to six hours. We tend to leave our jerky to dry closer to the six-hour range.

You can play with the texture of your jerky by adjusting the thickness of your slices, type of marinade or length of drying time. Once it's ready, you can seal your jerky in a vacuum sealed bag or sealed container, where it can keep for a month or so. That is, unless you eat it all.