Beef Jerky Made On The Electric Smoker - Easy And Delicious

I'm fresh out of beef jerky so today it's time to make some more and I'm gonna be making some smoked beef jerky out on the electric smoker [Music] so what we're working with today is about a two and a half pound top round you'll also see this in the store sold as London broil but it's top round now I did a step by step beef jerky video some time back so I'm not going to run through every exact step but this is still going to be a pretty comprehensive video on how to do this and the first thing we want to do is we want to trim this up to get the excess fat off of here you'll see that there's a pretty large piece of fat going here there's fat here a little bit over here you want as little fat in the meat as possible because that can make the meat turn rancid after a while so we're just going to go ahead here and we're gonna cut along this line to get this entire vein of fat out and we're gonna lose some of the meat but save the meat you can use it in other things making stock grinding up if you're making any hamburger nothing wrong with the meat or the fat on here it's just not good in beef jerky [Music] that's looking good right there [Music] down here's sharp knife really helps when you're doing this and there's gonna be some fat remaining it's not all gonna be gone so don't worry about getting every tiny little bit it's mainly the fat on the outside you're still going to have some marbling inside that looks pretty good so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna put this in the freezer for 30 minutes that helps it firm up and it's really gonna help when we slice it into those thinner pieces for jerky making so I'll see you back here in about 30 minutes all right here is our top round that's been in the freezer for half an hour it's just a little bit firm it's not frozen you don't want it solid you could go a little longer than thirty minutes but I wouldn't go much longer than that so what we're gonna do now we're just gonna take a sharp knife and we're gonna start from one end and you want the pieces to be as thin as you want them to be the thicker they are the longer it's gonna take to dry them out in the smoker and we're using the electric smoker today you could do this in the oven it's very similar process you just won't get that smoke flavor you would from the wood chips unless you add something like liquid smoke so here we go we're gonna start at this in and really we're just squaring this end off first we'll still use that piece but it's not a great piece it's gonna go as soon as possible here just something like that [Music] and you want to try and keep them a uniform thickness that way they'll all cook and dry it about the same pace they've done about the same time and we're cutting across the grain here the grain in this top round runs generally this way cutting across the grain is going to result in an easier pull when you bite on that beef jerkey if you cut it long ways with the grain which some people do you're gonna have more of that sort of tug and if you like that that's fine you can cut with the grain and these will shrink quite a bit if you've never made jerky before that's one of the things you learn very quickly is you have this nice hunk of meat and as you dry it out in your smoker or your oven you just see it sort of dwindle away but that just intensifies the flavor especially with the marinades you use we've got a good marinade were using today try and keep it squared up there if it gets a bow in it or something like that and you try and cut you're not going to get straight even pieces so try and square your end up if you move it and you may have one or two that are a little bit off but that's alright you can see as it sits out here how it's getting a little more loose and that makes it a little more difficult but without any time in the freezer it would be a lot harder to do this alright so this is what we're looking for all our pieces cut generally the same size I know some of them are probably a little off it's alright I've got a couple little straggler pieces over here those are gonna go in with those trimmings that we had we'll use those for hamburger or something when we grind stuff up now it's time to get this in the marinade alright so now we're just gonna transfer our meat into a bowl you could put this directly in just like a ziplock bag or something this is actually gonna go in a ziploc bag in the refrigerator for three to four hours if you marinade this you can marinate it overnight the longer the better actually I just don't have time to do it overnight today the marinade I'm using today is just a regular teriyaki sauce and to that I've added about a tablespoon of a ghost pepper maple syrup from Trader Joe's if you want to kick the heat up something like that is good add some chilli flakes anything like that that you want or just leave it teriyaki or your own favorite marinade so we're just gonna pour this marinade over this get in here mix it up a bit so everybody gets coated alright our top round pieces are ready to go into a ziplock bag in the refrigerator and I'll see you back here in about three or four hours when we get them on the rack and then take them out to the smoker all right our beef Jerky's been marinating for about four hours it's time to get it out of these ziplock bags and the marinade and to dry it off a little before we transfer it to the racks and get it out to the smoker all I'm gonna do is take pieces out individually I don't want to dump the juice here alright so I'm just gonna start patting this dry trying to get off as much of the moisture as possible it's not going to be fully dry that's alright this just helps the process of drying along once it's in the smoker if you don't put it in there with a ton of liquid all right I'm gonna finish drying these pieces off I'll bring you back when we put them on the racks all right here are our top round pieces that have been patted dry I'm gonna start putting them on the racks now get them out to the smoker so I'm just gonna lay these on the racks that are gonna slide right into the smoker this makes it much easier [Music] if they end up touching a little bit that's all right they're gonna shrink just don't want them overlapping this teriyaki marinade smells really good on here I'm gonna try and get this in with just two racks I think we should be able to do it a little piece right there we'll turn that guy it's going to set the other equi right on top load it up no we're gonna make two racks there's gonna be three just want to keep good airflow that's why we don't overlap again if they touch a little bit some of the pieces that's not a big a concern again you could do this straight in the oven if you wanted to we're gonna be running this at about a hundred and seventy-five degrees out on the electric smoker and we are not going to fit on two racks so I can either try and cram them a little bit which I think I'm gonna try and do here should be fine if I can just fit a few more pieces in here on each rack swap these and get a few more on this rack [Music] it's when I was a little more generous with space there we go two racks of beef jerky let's get it out to the electric smoker alright we've got smoke rolling out of the char-broil electric we're using a mix of hickory and maple today two flavors I really love you can see that the temperature inside the char-broil electric right now is 260 that's just to get the smoke rolling as soon as we get our meat in there we're gonna turn it down to 175 and we're gonna try and hold 175 throughout the entire cook on the electric holding temperatures pretty simple get our smoker opened up I have my temperature probe on the top rack I'm just adding our jerky pieces and the racks right below that alright let's get it closed up and make some jerky 175 it's gonna hold there it's gonna go up and down it'll settle in probably somewhere between the 165 and 185 range for most of the days it turns on and off so we have no moisture in the chamber there at all we're not adding any water in the drip pan no water pan nothing like that we're just gonna let these pieces of top round slowly dry out it can take anywhere from four hours to seven hours I don't like my beef jerky super dry I like her to be just a little bit of softness to it so my guest in here is gonna be somewhere in the five to six hour range but we'll see we'll be checking it again in a few hours and I'll bring you back when we check it okay our beef jerky has been in the smoker for three hours now you can see the smoker temp is at 188 as I said it would range somewhere probably between 165 and 185 so when the element goes on Kix temperature up reaches the temp starts to come down it's been right in that 175 degree range 10 degrees to either side the whole time so let's see how we're doing we are starting to look like jerky pulling it is out here it's immediately clear how much these pieces of shrunk let's take a look here and see how we're doing grab a piece and check it out right here is one of our pieces let's see what kind of Bend and flex we you can see it's bending starting to break so it's drying out quite well actually it's pretty good I'm actually gonna take a little taste of this see good flavor still needs to dry out more but we are definitely getting there we are on the right track I think I mentioned I like to dry min so it's not too dry I'm not trying to preserve it for months and months this will be gone in less than a week it'll be in the refrigerator so I want a little bit of the moisture left in it so I think about five hours really it's gonna be perfect we'll check it at 4:00 and see though you never know might be done let's close this up let it keep smoking we'll check this again in about an hour all right smokers holding good at 179 180 right there and it's been a little over four hours now so I'm gonna check these I have a feeling they may be done they were pretty pretty close the last time at three hours so these are moved pretty quickly see how we're doing here those are looking really good very jerky like and see that that's exactly how I like it a little bit of moisture still in there it's not dried out and snapping but it definitely is on the verge of that this is how I like my jerky it's time to get this in and have a good taste all right here is our beef jerky smoked on the electric smoker I could sit here tell you lots of things about it but just look at it it looks great made just the way I like it and I got to tell you it's time to taste so here we go nice piece you can see it breaks apart easily if you wanted to make this jerky for longer term preservation you'd have to take it to a drier state get more of the moisture out of it you'd probably be going another three or four hours maybe even longer but this is the way I like it so here we go when I was a kid beef jerky was my favorite treat if I saw one of those packages in the store with my parents I would just beg them for some beef jerky because I just loved it so much and now I'm being able to make my own that's the treat great teriyaki flavor great smoke flavor from that Hickory and maple and just a little hit from that Ghost Pepper maple syrup just a tiny little kick in the background not hot by any stretch of the imagination if you wanted it hot you could definitely do it by adding more of that Ghost Pepper maple syrup or anything else you want red pepper flakes things like that I don't like a whole lot of heat in my beef jerky I like the flavor total cook time today was just over four hours which is pretty fast for jerky at about 175 degrees one of the things that helped today was it's very low humidity extremely dry today so we weren't competing with outside conditions in the smoker there with moisture wanting to come in it was all leaving and that helped this cook a little quicker now because I didn't drive this out to be preserved it'll be kept in the refrigerator for a few days it'll be long gone before three or four days are out and that's how I like making batches of beef jerky just enough that's gonna last a few days that way I don't have to dry it out too much for longer-term preservation nothing wrong with that this is just the way that I choose to do it if you wanted to do this in the oven you completely could same thing low temperature 165 275 degrees if you wanted smoke flavor you could add some liquid smoke to the marinade I would start with a small amount maybe a half a teaspoon you can always add more if you think you need more smoke flavor but you don't want to overpower it with smoke so if you've never made beef jerky but wanted to if you have an electric smoker an oven you can do this very simple procedures just give it that marinade give it some time and you'll end up with this [Music]

Channel: Cooking With Ry

Views: 122,674

Rating: 4.9027777 out of 5

Keywords: cooking, cooking channel, cooking with ry, ryne pearson, ryne douglas pearson, beef jerky, electric smoker, how to make beef jerky

Id: b-RYBxF3fj4

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019