Beef Snack Sticks Using the LEM Jerky Gun

today we're going to use the lem jerky gun and the little chief smoker here behind me to make some beef snack sticks so thanks for joining and let's get started and okay so i've got a pound of ground beef here uh first thing i want to do and by the way we're using just the uh seasoning mix that came with the jerky gun that i that i have so we're going to try it out and in that mix is the actual seasoning as well as curing salt so i've just used the directions on the back of the package and got these out and measured them out so first thing i'm going to do is i've got an ounce of water again just following the instructions and i'm going to mix that curing salt in with it and i'm just going to let it sit for a second and i'm going to get my ground beef ready just break it up a little bit again this is the first time i've done this so it's just going to be kind of an experiment we'll see how it goes not worried about it okay so first i'm going to take my seasoning and just sprinkle it in spread it around a little bit and this the water and the curing salt is all that is actually called for in the recipe but i'm gonna make it my own just a little bit seasoning smells really good so in terms of making it my own i've got some freeze-dried jalapenos that i have here i'll show them to you just a jar that i picked up i think i got it on amazon so i didn't even measure these out i just put what i thought looked good might actually end up making these pretty spicy i will see and i've also got some high temperature cheese so if you don't uh haven't heard of high temperature cheese they use it in in things like this uh it will resist melting up to like 400 degrees or something like that so we're just going to add a little bit of that and again i didn't measure this out um matter of fact i don't even think i'm going to use it all be yeah what the heck we'll just do it we'll see how it goes so now i'm going to mix this and get it incorporated as much as i can all right and then the last thing i'll do is pour the water in it's a little bit warm water so i wanted it to uh to cool off just a little bit and it's got the curing salt in it that prague powder pink salt number one or whatever it is called it's not normal salt though that's important to know and so now i'm just going to mix this together by the way this is 80 20 ground beef the package suggested that i could have used any meat though so i'd like to get some ground deer and use some deer at some point but once it gets fully incorporated in order to use the jerky gun which i'll get out here in a second you need to get it prepared to put in the jerky gun and the best way i've seen to do this is to just roll it into like a sausage shape uh the jerky gun is around two inches across so you just want it to be able to slide down in the in the jerky gun and not get the sides all dirty so just going to do the best i can just create a couple of probably three or four log shapes that will fit down through the diameter of the jerky gun you could also do a little meatball size that would fit in there i think this will actually be better for not having air pockets in the meat sticks just gotta do one last one here all right so we'll get the jerky gun set up and we'll bring you back so i decided to pivot just a little bit uh first of all i decided to go with little meatball shapes to put in the jerky gun and i also decided to do two pounds of ground beef so i essentially just added another pound of ground beef and made the recipe double using the seasonings the jerky gun is is really just a meat caulking gun really so i'm gonna start loading it up and here is the other end of that that just screws on and it literally works like a caulking gun so i'll pull out the plunger and we'll get this set up so i'll just start dropping these meatballs in and i expect this will hold maybe a little more than a pound of our jerky or our beef stick meat some of these are going to be a little too wide so i'm going to maybe roll them just a little bit to make sure they drop down in easy enough i want to attempt to keep the outside of the jerky gun as clean as possible sorry i don't know that i'm really getting this on camera very well but hopefully you get the idea and this is going to be pretty close to full i might be able to get one more in use the smaller one and then maybe one more so i'll have to do a reload to do part of this i think if i remember correctly this is a will hold a pound and a half so uh hopefully got uh close to a pound and a half in there so we'll get the jerky gun set up and get our collagen casings loaded on the end here and we'll get some of these beef sticks made so we'll bring you back okay so i'm gonna start uh feeding these casings we'll see how it goes again first time i've done this so um hopefully uh we get some decent beef sticks so i'm just gonna start squeezing the trigger of this and it will eventually start coming out the end and there it goes so hopefully so my racks for the little chief are about 10 inches square just a little over 10 inches so i want to make sure i can always cut them if i need to but i want to try to get these uh a good size so i don't have to cut them so that's actually probably a little bit too big but we'll call it okay and cut this one in half and then i'll make the rest of them just a little less the tip that i'm using is actually a little small for these collagen casings so it's going to cause a little bit of a oops a little bit of a ugly case but i don't think it will affect anything but again live and learn so we're just going to keep doing this so they make these casings in a much wider version as well so you can make like a summer sausage so i might take my summer sausage recipe [Music] and throw it in a casing the next time if you haven't watched that i do have that on uh another video um really simple to make tastes really good i think i said in the uh video that you'd never buy hickory farms again it is really good okay so that is all of the casing that i could get on for that round so what i'm going to do is add more casing i will likely need to add more of the sausage mixture hopefully the rest here shortly i'm going to go ahead and do that and then we will see you at the little chief smoker all right so i got through all of these um live and learn the second half of these turned out a lot prettier i don't think it'll affect the taste so i'm not going to worry too much about it but hopefully you can see on camera the difference between the second half of these in the first half as far as appearance again i think they'll still be good i don't think they'll taste any different i know they won't taste any different uh i am a little disappointed i didn't figure this out earlier but you know this is this is real life here i'm not going to edit it just to make things look pretty so we're going to load these up on our little chief racks i want to leave enough room for the airflow to move around a lot because ultimately what we're going to do is is there's certainly going to be some heat involved and we'll take them up to 165 but we're really drying them out you know there's curing salt in these we'll dry them out they'll last a long time that way and we'll talk a little bit about the little chief process when we get outside here in just a minute so i'm gonna finish racking these up and we'll see you out at the little chief to get these started okay here we are at the little chief uh if you don't know how the little chi for the big chief work either one is pretty much the same principle it is just an aluminum box essentially the pan of wood chips smokes and adds flavor to your meat there's a heating element in the bottom i've got it plugged in so i'll just make sure that that is on and it is so you put the pan of wood chips in i've got my beef sticks in place i've got three trays with six or eight uh on each and then we just uh cover the opening in the front i they i have an option where the top comes off and you lift your food down in i thought this would be easier but this is a really inexpensive little smoker that you can do salmon on you can add smoke to any meat and then transfer it to another cooker because the temperature only gets up to around 165 or so ambient temperature outside certainly affects that but you can add smoke to a lot of different things and then in this case we'll do all of these beef sticks 100 in this unit other food you can move to uh to another smoker that gets hotter or even your oven uh so i'm just gonna let these go uh you can add as many pans of wood chips as you need to just dump the old ash out into a metal bucket of some kind because it certainly will be hot and then add more wood by the way i'm using pecan today pecan will add a nice mild flavor and not be overpowering once you think you've added enough smoke then it just really acts like a dehydrator temperature will remain but it won't be providing more smoke flavor because you can certainly over smoke things like this and you don't want to do that so i may only add two pans i might even only add one it just depends on how i'm feeling what i don't want to do is over smoke them and have them not be good because i think the flavor will be pretty good no matter what so if one pan i decide isn't enough i'll add two the next time but this time i'm i'm not adding any more than two and may stick with one i just haven't decided yet so we're just gonna let this go the first pan will probably take about an hour and a half to burn through i'll check on them then and probably bring you back my suspicion is these will be on six hours maybe something like that uh we'll take them to an internal uh temperature of 165 and then put them in an ice bath to cool them off quickly and stop them from cooking that will also help the casings not to shrivel up though i'm going to have that issue with half of mine anyway so i'm not super worried about that so thanks for tuning in as usual and just a quick ask from me if you could take the time to uh like this video and subscribe to the channel i'd certainly be grateful if you haven't already done so so we'll bring you back okay our beef sticks have been smoking away here it's probably been about two hours maybe uh not quite hour and 45 minutes i'm gonna check my wood chips all right they're pretty well lashed over the smoke rolling through here has been really good but so i think i'm gonna not refill the chip wood chip pan i'm just gonna empty those it's kind of windy out here so i'm gonna get them back in here for a minute so they don't blow everywhere and then just to let the little chief roll as a dehydrator now for the rest of the cook i just want to be careful not to over smoke them again first time next time we can do more wood chips if we think it would be better they're looking great the color is great firming up a little bit still kind of soft though too so definitely have more time to go so i'm going to pull these wood chips then i am going to just let this go probably for at least another two hours before i even look at them again and then we'll do kind of a firmness test i might temperature probe one of them things this small are tough to temperature probe but we might be able to get an idea of the temperature uh so we'll we'll bring you back thank you okay so it has been right at six hours for these beef sticks i've looked at them once they were looking good i think they're probably about ready so we're gonna take a look together here color is great um just pull one out here i'll pull one of the nice ones out where i learned how to use the jerky gun better so this is really what i was shooting for um i think these are ready so i am going to pull these off and we'll bring them inside um what i am going to do and i'm not going to put this on video because it's not that big of a deal i'm going to get a little pan with some ice and water in it and i'm going to put them straight into that to completely stop the cooking process and also from what i understand will keep the casings from shriveling too much although a lot of mine already shriveled just because of the way i did it as a first time beef stick maker so but i think these are going to be pretty good so uh we'll bring you back we'll try one all right so here's the finished product i think they actually turned out really good so they have been rested put in an ice bath ice water bath and dried off so i'm going to try one i haven't tried it yet of course some of them are a little bit wrinkly that is my fault from the way i used the jerky gun so but i'll just try this one and i'm not gonna bother doing it on camera so that's a slim jim on steroids that's pretty good smoky but not too smoky i am glad i didn't use more than one pan of chips that's a great snack i'm really pleased with how these turned out super easy i will put a link in the description for the lem jerky gun as well as the little chief smoker so check those out sometime and consider doing these yourself thanks again for watching the buckeye barbecue channel by the way these are not too spicy i should say that i was a little worried about that because of those freeze-dried jalapenos but thanks for joining me today please like and subscribe to the channel like this video i'd greatly appreciate it and we'll see you next time

Channel: BuQeye BBQ

Views: 34,019

Keywords: lem jerky cannon, little chief, beef snack sticks

Id: hFBZdzYMjl4

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021