How To Make Beef Jerky - Step By Step

can you tell I just got over a pretty bad cold this is the voice you're gonna get today but it's worth it cuz we're gonna be making something that I'd loved as a kid I would beg my parents to get me more of and now that I'm older and grown I can make it myself and I'm talking about beef jerky [Music] that's right beef jerky hopefully you can follow along in this with my voice I may have to put subtitles I don't know I promise you I'm not trying to do it Henry Kissinger impression for those of you under 40 you probably don't know what that means so what we're starting with today here is a top round sometimes you'll see this cut as listed as London broil even though that's not a cut of meat that's how you would cook it but what we need to do first is remove as much of the fat as we can from this you want the leanest cuts of meat you can get when you're gonna be making beef jerky fat will make it spoil now I'm not going to be keeping this beef jerky for long but I'm gonna be following the same procedures if you have a lot of fat in it and you're keeping it for days and weeks after you've preserved it it's gonna have a tendency to spoil so you want to get rid of that fat so that's what we're gonna do here it's gonna follow this line up here and you do lose a little bit of meat in the process but you can save these pieces use them for something else Adam to some chuck if you're grinding up for hamburger or tri-tip or something like that great to add some fat for some grindings you're always gonna have a little bit of fat inside the meat that's okay you just don't want an excess amount of fat let's turn this around and check this side here you can see we got a little bit right here we want to cut away so we already have a little bit of oxidation here in this cut so this is actually going to be good to use this for jerky see it's a little bit right here as we Bend this up we're just gonna take our knife cut these little bits out got some more right here slide our knife under follow along get that bit off I said if you lose a little bit of the meat that's okay you can use it for something else you want to get this as lean as possible to be used for jerky and you can see we've got like a vein of fat running through here we'll just live with that as we're making our jerky today but right now on the outside that's looking pretty good just a little bit more right here all right so there's our trimmed up piece of top round I'm gonna put this in the freezer for about 30 minutes to firm up that's gonna make it a lot easier to slice and while it's firming up we're gonna make the marinade for this so our marinade for this is really simple and the bottom line to all this is you can make whatever marinade you want whatever flavor you want to develop you kid you go straight teriyaki sauce straight worste sure there's lots of things you can do this is the one I decided to do first thing I'm starting off with here it's about two-thirds of a cup of a Lajoie ginger garlic marinade then I'm gonna be adding two tablespoons of Worcestershire worst Wurster sauce about three tablespoons of brown sugar the spice mixture I'm adding to this is two teaspoons of ground black pepper two teaspoons of garlic powder and one teaspoon of chipotle chili powder not Chipotle Chipotle people being calling me on that every time I say it in videos I'm sorry I say Chipotle but it's Chipotle and then we're just going to mix it up it's a fairly thick marinade as you can see but that's what we want we're gonna get a good coating on all our strips of meat once we cut them let's see how that tastes oh that's good that's good all right we're gonna put our marinade in the refrigerator to sit for about 15 minutes while our meat finishes firming up in the freezer I'll bring you back all right so our top round is firmed up a little bit you don't want to get it to where it's frozen you want to just get it firmed up a little bit and now we have a decision to make we can see the grain running through our cut of meat here it's generally running this way there's two different schools of thought on beef jerky and two different choices there's no right or wrong one you've probably all had beef jerky where you bite in you go and you pull on it that's generally cut along the grain so you're gonna have more of a pull when you bite it you probably also had beef jerky where you bite it and it comes apart really easily that's cut across the grain today I'm gonna be making my jerky pieces across the grain I want less of a pole so I'm positioning my cut of meat my grain is running this way I'm gonna be making cuts that are approximately a quarter inch thick remember this is gonna shrink up a lot when we smoke it for that low and slow time so that quarter inch is actually going to come down to probably an eighth of an inch or less in many cases so our first cut is probably not going to be the greatest because we have to kind of square off this end now we're just gonna try and make straight cuts about a quarter inch sharp knife really helps here [Music] these end pieces are obviously gonna be a lot different than those at the center that's alright so I'm just gonna leave that end chunk there in this little end piece over here so there we have our slice up top around everything about a quarter inch I think it looks pretty good now I'm gonna get it into a dish cover it with that marinade make sure every bit gets a good amount on it you could also put it into a plastic ziplock bag or something like that but we're gonna get it in there and it's gonna go in the refrigerator overnight so what I'm gonna do is just place these strips in here if there's any of their still stuck together just cut them apart it doesn't matter if they each are laying flat they're gonna overlap here more critical part is when they're in the smoker not to have them overlapping or touching I want to make sure they have a good airspace in there but we'll cover that tomorrow when we actually get them in the smoker alright we got all our pieces in there now I'm just gonna take the marinade we made and pour it over this all out of there now some people make a lot of marinade where it's actually just sitting in it you don't really need that much in my opinion you just need enough to cover it because you're just gonna be doing this to it rubbing that marinade in I think all the pieces coated remember they're gonna be sitting in this overnight now if you don't have time to do it overnight four to eight hours is enough the longer the better but overnight it's gonna give this a chance to really penetrate into this top round every piece nice and coated alright that's it it's marinated we're gonna cover this up put it in the refrigerator it's gonna sit there overnight and I'll bring you back tomorrow when we get it in the smoker hopefully my voice will be better by then - all right our beef jerky has been marinating overnight and so is my voice I don't know it's better I don't really think so but I'm gonna push through stick with me here okay the first thing we've got to do is we have to take off some of this marinade that's been sitting on these top round strips overnight so what we're gonna do we're just gonna lay them on a tray you can also put them on a rack let it drain off naturally we're just gonna do it paper towels now we're not getting all of the marinade off we're just taking off the excess once you get the excess off transfer it into a fresh dish set it aside smells really good I think I actually sound more like Henry Kissinger today we will go to China and we will make history again if you're under 40 maybe under 50 you won't get that joke now I've got the smoker going it's set at a hundred and sixty-five degrees that's what we're gonna be running it at today I've got some peach wood chips in there not very many because the smoke it's gonna take is gonna be really during the early stages I'm not gonna be running smoke throughout the whole thing making jerky is primarily a drying process so using that smoker at a lower temperature to slowly dry the meat that's what we're doing now one thing to remember is you don't need a smoker to do this a smoker does add some extra flavor but you can do this in the oven you can add liquid smoke to your marinade if you want some of that smoky flavor just don't add too much there's plenty of recipes online on how to do this in the oven but if you've got an electric smoker it's nice it's really nice to do it this way why electric and why not the offset or some other type of smoker well you could do it probably in a pellet smoker but even that's a little difficult to keep in this lower range of temperatures an electric smoker actually allows you to dial in this low temperature and maintain it for a longer period of time we're probably going to be smoking anywhere from its big range here four to nine hours it really depends on the meet the weather right now today outside it's kind of cold and gray the humidity is pretty high so we're not gonna know we're gonna have to keep testing after about three hours we'll be checking this jerky to see what it's consistency is how floppy it is how stiff it is that's what we're looking for we want the meat to be stiff but not not breakable not like you're gonna bend it and snap it so here is our jerky that we've patted dry it still has plenty of moisture on it and marinade now what I need to do is place it on racks that are gonna slide in the smoker so I've got one of my racks laid out here and I'm just going to start placing the strips on here the goal is to not have them touch we want to have good airflow and air circulation around these planning on using two racks today I don't think I'll need a third some people like to actually skewer these with toothpicks and hang them from the rack so they dangle down nothing wrong with that at all if you want to try that go for it so this is one rack here I'm going to take my second rack just lay it right on top because they're gonna be separated once I put them in the smoker I'll make any adjustments I need to before they go in to make sure everybody's got good spacing there we go our jerky is on the racks ready to go in the smoker I can see from the thermo Pro wireless thermometer that our temperature is right up there so we're gonna go get these in smokers up to temp time to get our beef jerky strips in there see I have the wireless thermometer probe on the top rack here so I'll be putting the other two racks immediately below it so that's the setup we have we've got peach wood chips in there as I mentioned got a little bit of smoke coming already it'll build over the next half hour to 45 minutes we're only gonna get about an hour hour and 15 minutes of smoke out of this I didn't put many chips in there at all most of the flavor of this comes from the marinade that smoke is just a little addition so let's get this closed up and cooking any of you who've watched my channel for a while may be noticing something the glass and my smoker door is clean I have always said I don't care if it's clean or not I don't look in it but my wife just got sick of it looking so dirty and she came out and cleaned it so I have to thank her and if you're happy that you can see the food through the glass you can thank her too so it's about 9:30 in the morning right now we're gonna come back and check this in two and a half hours at noon that'll be when we should first start seeing signs of it becoming jerky you know we should be seeing that shrinkage in there we should be seeing the meat tighten up so we'll come back take a look at it then okay it's been two and a half hours it's noon right now still sort of gray and cold and humid a little bit of drizzle but it's time to check this beef jerky let's get this opened up oh yeah definitely starting to look like jerky a lot of shrinkage there those pieces are much smaller let's take one out and check the firmness of it so here is our piece of jerky let's see how still floppy bendable but it's not dried out yet so it's the last plenty more to go I'm gonna say probably at least another two hours but it's definitely shrinking getting good color there it's looking really nice smells great too let's get this back in I'm so tempted to take a taste right now but it'll be worth the wait alright let's close this up let it keep going alright it's 2 o'clock it's been 2 hours since our last check let's see how this Jerky's doing yeah looking good looking more like jerky each time we check alright so let's get this piece out of here so let's sort of floppy wanted to be a little stiffer than that can I get a little more time just by the feel of that I'm guessing it's gonna be one more hour I don't like my beef jerky to be really really dry so what I felt there but I can smell also telling me it's just about done so I think at one hour we're gonna be right on the money I'll bring you back ok we are at just about 6 hours I'm almost positive these are just exactly the way I want them so let's take a look oh yeah if you look over here there's missing piece I cheated I tasted one already cuz I had to share one with my wife these are looking really good ok I'm gonna go ahead and pull one off of here give it a taste now some people insist upon waiting until these are cool and just you know been stored for a while to taste them I actually love the flavor when it's fresh out of the smoker they'll be good in like a day or two also but like I said I'm not making this batch to store for any length of time this will last a couple days let's see let's give us a taste first let's see the consistency see how stiff that is Springs right back see that Springs right back if we bend it it doesn't snap it breaks let's take a taste mmm-hmm that's good hmm a marinade penetrated perfectly 24 hours in the refrigerator you're gonna get great penetration on the marinade mmm a little extra smoke flavor from that peach peach is a very subtle fruit wood it's not gonna give you a lot of overpowering flavor but I actually think it does something to the outside mmm-hmm remember what I was saying about cutting across the grain first was cutting with the grain two different ways to do your jerky you want that pull right here on this one the grain is running this way so if I bite this way it's gonna pull easily just like that this way the grain is running this way that's the pull you just have to make the choice which way you want it either way you do it though that flavor is great so that was a total of six hours at 165 degrees with some peach wood smoke right only at the beginning about the first hour that's it everything else was just that low heat taking it slowly removing the moisture drying it out getting it to the jerky consistency very easy to do and as you could see you could do this in the oven low and slow in there you don't need the smoke flavor and if you do want it as I mentioned before add some liquid smoke to your marinade I hope you enjoyed this video feel free to check out some of the other videos on my channel and consider subscribing and if you do click that bell for notifications thank you all for watching so we have a great day I'll see you again soon

Channel: Cooking With Ry

Views: 926,946

Keywords: cooking, cooking channel, cooking with ry, ryne pearson, ryne douglas pearson, beef jerky, top round, london broil, electric smoker, how to make beef jerky, smoking beef jerky, snack food, drying beef

Id: chlllchzch0

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018