How to Make Beef Jerky Fan
Media Platforms Design Team
There's no reason to pay the outlandish store prices for beef jerky—it's the ultimate DIY food.
As any meat-lover will readily agree to, one of the most unsettling things about the 21st century is the fact that a few ounces of beef jerky—easily the greatest foodstuff of all time—can cost as much as six or seven dollars. If you're like us, that just won't do.
Instead, using a method adapted from the great jerky enthusiast Alton Brown, we'll walk you through how to create pounds of stunningly good beef jerky at a mere fraction of the market price. You'll need only some beef, a few marinating ingredients, a box fan, and a couple of cellulose air-filters that you can buy at any hardware store.
Before we start: You should know that beef jerky is not only absurdly easy to make, but it's also one of the few ways to prepare uncooked meat that's safe to eat. Like smoking or salting, letting thin strips dry out actually preserves and sterilizes meat. The reason is simple: Most meat-eating microbes need water, and making jerky involves little more than removing all the moisture from beef. Properly prepared and stored, uncooked beef jerky will stay preserved for years.
Depending on what cut of meat you use, your jerky can vary dramatically in flavor. You're going to want to pick a very lean cut of beef (resist the knee-jerk reaction to find a well marbled hunk of meat) that can be cut in thin strips along the grain. Here, I'm using 4.5 lbs of top-round steak. I'd suggest that, or eye-of-round steak. Both work great.
Pop the meat into a freezer about 20 minutes before you start slicing it. Following a short burst of freezer time, the firm, cold beef will be much easier to cut.
Use a sharp knife to trim any fat attached to your cut of beef. And I mean all of it. While dried meat can keep at room temperature for a long time, fat will go rancid. That's one big reason we've started with a lean cut of beef that's minimally marbled with fat.
With a firm grip, carefully carve the beef into 1/8th inch slices along the natural grain of the meat. If you cut against the grain, the jerky will crumble as it dries. If you're carving up hunks of top round like I am, then halve the steaks first and you'll have an easier time.
A little variation in the size of your cuts is fine, but aim for thin slices. The thicker the cuts, the longer it'll all take to air dry.
Your slivers of beef should be about this thin.
Slicing the beef into evenly sized slivers is easily the hardest part of making jerky. So if your knife work looks a little bit too much like this, there's no shame in asking your butcher to trim and slice the beef for you.
Set aside your mountain of meat for a moment. It's time to make some marinade. This stuff does more than add flavor. A slightly acidic marinade will change the beef's pH, which will aid in the process of killing any microbes.
You can marinade with whatever you like, but to cook up one that's slightly acidic, try using soy sauce.
For my 4.5 lbs of beef, I'm filling a large bowl with:
5 cups of BBQ sauce
2 cups of soy sauce
1Ž2 cup of Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon of liquid smoke
(cont.)
… and these dry ingredients:
2 tablespoons of flaked red pepper (more if you like the heat)
3 tablespoons of toasted sesame seeds
1 tablespoon of onion powder
2 medium-sized cloves of fresh crushed garlic
Sliver by sliver, dip your beef into the marinade and stir. Although you'll be tempted to just chuck it all in, don't! The slices of beef will stick and will come out unevenly marinated.
Plastic-wrap the top of your marinating bowl of meat and pop it in the fridge for a day—or at least overnight. During this interlude, our marinade isn't just coating the beef with flavor—it's seeping deep into the meat. Let it seep.
By now our meat has finished marinating. So now it's time for the fun part: the jerky drying process. Alongside what you put together yesterday, you'll need:
1 20-inch box fan
4 cellulose air filters of the same size (try to avoid plastic filters if you can)
A couple of cans to prop up the fan (not pictured)
On three of your four air filters, lay out your marinated meat. Whether the meat is placed alongside the grooves of the filter or across them doesn't really matter, but just make sure you don't place more than a single layer of meat on each filter. We want maximum airflow on all sides of each strip.
Next, use a few cans to prop up your fan someplace bug-free (and someplace where you're ready to have the smell of beef jerky linger for the next few days). We're going to be placing our filters directly on top of the upward-facing fan—the cans underneath are only there to create a gap and let the fan pull in air.
Place your meat-laden air filters directly on top of the fan, and square them up. Your 4th filter should be on top, creating a giant raw-meat sandwich. This filter placement will allow air to move around all the meat and carry away moisture. Plus, it'll seal away the jerky from any curious flying insects. Crank the fan up to maximum power.
The top filter, although light, should stay steady. But if it starts to move, you can use either a bungee cord or a small weight to keep it in place.
Now, remember when I said cutting the meat was the hardest part about making beef jerky? I lied. Here is the hardest part: Waiting patiently as the beautiful aroma of jerky slowly pervades your home.
Depending on the thinness of your cuts (and how humid the air is), the drying can take anywhere from 12 to 20 hours. Don't forget to shuffle the filters every few hours so the meat dries evenly.
As your jerky dries, it'll get lighter by almost half and will start to look like this. You can check it by tearing pieces as the drying process goes on, but refrain from munching on the jerky until the drying process is done.
Here's what you're going for. You'll know your jerky is done drying when it tears like thick paper. At the seam of each tear should be the stringy-white filaments of dried muscle pictured above.
Now give it a chew! Pretty damn good, huh?
Side note: Depending on what marinade you used, there's a possibility that as the meat dried, some of the on the air filter's cellulose fibers will have gotten stuck to the sticky marinade. If so, just pull them off. Don't worry, they're safe to eat.
I've placed my jerky in a zip-lock bag to weigh it (out of the 4 ½ lbs on meat, I ended up with almost exactly 2 ¼ lbs of jerky). But here's an important note: Don't store your jerky in a zip-lock bag or refrigerate it! You'll lock in moisture alongside the jerky, which will re-moisturize the jerky and turn it rancid rather quickly. Rather, keep it bundled in wax or parchment paper out in the open. Jerky is already the ultimate preserved food, and in the dry, open air (away from bugs) it'll last you years.
But who are we kidding? It'll be gone in a week.
William Herkewitz Science & Technology Reporter William Herkewitz is a science and technology journalist based in Berlin, Germany.
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Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to/g1571/make-your-own-diy-box-fan-beef-jerky/
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