How to make Biltong in the USA

[Music] when making bolton there's two key things that you have to do with the meat you firstly have to cure the meat which is the process of putting salt onto the meat and that allows for it to dehydrate and dry which then in turn turns the beef into biltong the second thing that you can do with the meat is you can preserve it with something and typically what you use when preserving the meat is vinegar so we're going to use both vinegar and salt those are the two things you need if you want to make bolt-on i use red vinegar so i'll use the red vinegar to preserve the meat and then i just use normal iodized salt when i want to cure the meat now just the salt in just the vinegar will give you perfectly cured meat but if you actually want to make biltong you need to add some additional spices to the mix to the salt we're going to add two spices the first spice we'll add is black pepper so i use just the normal off the rack black pepper nothing fancy there and then the second thing that i use is i use coriander so coriander i typically like to buy the coriander seeds and these coriander seeds i'm going to grind in my coffee grinder i'm not going to grind them too fine because i like the little flakes that adhere to the meat so the mix is a very very simple mix i'm going to go 50 50 combining the coriander and the black pepper into one half in other words one quarter black pepper one quarter coriander and the other half will be salt so let's make the mix i have two simple cup measures here one whole cup measure and one half cup measure in the whole cup measure i'm gonna add the salt so i'll fill that up with salt and remember that's the mixture we want we want half salt and then the other half will be a combination between the pepper and the ground coriander so there's my salt i'm going to put that into a container and then in the other half i'm going to take a half a cup of black pepper so quickly mix that in here there's a half cup of black pepper that'll go into my mixture then the other half cup will be the coriander seeds so before i grind my coriander seeds i'm going to put them into this half cup i'll just scoop from this container this is a nice healthy scoop this is what's going to give the bolt on its distinct taste you can add other spices if you want to as well but the coriander and the black pepper together with the salt is what makes it taste like volta so all of that goes into my pepper grinder and i'm going to grind that for a few seconds i'm just pulsing it because i don't want to grind it too soft too fine i just wanted to get a nice consistency it looks something like this which i can then add to the rest of my mixture and that is the simplest form of bottom spice that you can make from here you can add anything you want you can add cloves you can add nutmeg some people like to add chili powder or very very spice you can even add things like garlic it's entirely up to you i've seen people add brown sugar but again that's not necessarily something that you need main things you need is a mixture of the pepper the salt and the coriander and remember i'm mixing it one half salt one quarter pepper one quarter coriander after making the spices i need a way to get it onto the bottom the easiest thing to do is to just use a spice shaker i have a little stainless steel one that i use i'm going to transfer the spices from my container into the shaker in order to do so i'm just going to grab a spoon spoon some in here and i'll let that fall up automatically you'll see this is a much easier way to get the spice onto the ball tongue without having to use too much of a effort and this will allow us to create a very very nice even spread of the spices when we actually attach them to the bottom now that i've added all the spices into the container i'm just going to screw the lid on so now i'm ready to put the spice onto the bolt on so let's look at the next step all right now that our spices are made the next thing for us to do is to actually start preparing the meat now the purpose of this video is really to show you a cheap and an easy way to make biltong the meat that i prefer to buy is the bottom round steak this is something that you can buy from most outlets i bought this at one of the big box stores it sells for two dollars and 74 cents per pound which is a very reasonable cost at the end of this video i'll actually show you a comparison of different costs when making bolt-on and when i prepare the round the process is very simple i'm going to take the meat and i want this one side of the meat that has the nice fatty piece in order to use that for my main pieces of bolt up so i'm going to lay that down flat and i'm going to cut about a two inch strip of this meat that's going to give me a very nice piece of bolt on once it dries out now keep in mind you're going to lose about half the weight of the meat as it starts drying out in the process so let me quickly process this packet and then we'll talk about how we spice and dry the meat i'm going to keep these smaller pieces to make biltong sticks or chili bites some people refer to them later on during the same video but for now we're most interested in these big fat pieces because they are the ones that we're going to be using to make our main botox so let me quickly finish cutting these up now as i said you can buy boton online for some exorbitant prices i found that this way of buying it is actually one of the most cost effective ways of doing it if you have a butcher that can cut your bolton or your bottom round into nice pieces for you you're welcome to have somebody do that but for now i'm going to stick with what i can buy cheaply and easily and i'm going to use that in order to make the bull top while i'm busy preparing the meat i'm also going to cut these other pieces into slightly thinner strips probably about a quarter to half an inch wide because these are the pieces we'll use later to make our biltong sticks i'm just going to cut them nice and thin because i'll hang them up individually in order to make my bottom sticks all right so all of our meat is cut for now again you can make as much bull tongue as you want to we usually go through somewhere between five and ten pounds a week so i make biltong every two weeks or so with the meat that i buy if you have place to hang a lot of biltong that's great if you don't if you're using a dehydrating box you may only want to make a few pieces at a time so the meat is cut we've prepared our spices and as i said earlier there's two processes that we're going to be involved or use during making this process we're going to use the salt to cure the meat and we've added the black pepper and the coriander to the salt the second thing that we're going to use is we're going to use the vinegar in order to preserve the meat now some people take their poltang and they leave it in the vinegar for an extended period of time i personally don't like the taste of that so i use red wine vinegar or you can use white wine vinegar it's entirely up to you i put about a cup or so into a container just enough so that i can immerse the meat in that and as i said this is a very quick and a very fast process for me if you want to leave your meat in the vinegar for longer it's entirely up to you but i don't recommend it because i don't like the taste of it together with the vinegar i'm also going to add about a tablespoon of worcester sauce which is again the normal stuff you would buy from any store it makes a nice mix and it gives the meat a nice taste i also have a container here where i'm gonna let the meat dry and i usually let my meat lie after i've spiced it for an hour or two just to absorb the salt so i take the meat i very quickly dip it in the vinegar mix and i then put it on the drying rack as i said you can do this a hundred different ways i prefer this way because it really gives the meat a nice taste and a nice flavor without necessarily making it taste too much like vinegar and absorbing too much of that it comes out giving you a nice brown or a sort of a blackish edge on the outside of the bolton while the inside of it stays nice and pink and again depending on how long you hang it it may end up getting a little bit drier i usually don't hang it for more than two or three days so i'm gonna stop there for now and i'm gonna put spices on i'll come back to the uh to the meat sticks that i'm gonna make a little bit later now that i have my bolton in my rack i'm gonna add some spice to it this is that same spice i showed you earlier which i've put into a shaker and i'm gonna shake this bolton spice which is the combination of the pepper the salt and the coriander and i'm going to use quite a bit of it on the meat i usually let the meat lie for about an hour or so i cover it up with some foil you can put it back into the refrigerator if you want to as well but i really like it to absorb these tastes while it's drying and hanging on the drying rack these spices will obviously adhere to the meat but i really want the taste of the coriander and the black pepper as well as the salt to get into the mix and again remember as part of the curing curing implies that you're trying to get all the moisture out of the meat that's what the salt is for so now that this is done i'm gonna leave this meat for about two hours and then after that i'll start hanging it up now that my built-ons are resting i'm also going to make some meat sticks out of the other pieces that i cut off now i like mine very spicy so i've just bought some crushed red pepper flakes that i'm gonna add to about a half a cup of the bolton spice that i have over here again this is entirely to taste i like mine quite spicy so i'm gonna add the best part of about a tablespoon of the red calif red chili flakes in here once i've got those in here i'm going to close up my shaker and i'm going to mix it well inside here so we make sure we have that nicely mixed into our our spice mix and then open it on its largest setting so that we can get those out and then the process is exactly the same i'm gonna take my meat sticks very quickly dip them in my mixture which is about a cup of vinegar and about a tablespoon of worcester sauce i'm going to lay these out on a drying rack because again i want some of this liquid to drop off while they're busy drying right let's see if i can quickly get all of these done throw a few more in here and get it done a little bit quicker now as i've said before in this video and i'll keep reminding everybody this is by no means you know the definitive way to make bolton this is a cheap and easy way to make volton if you want to make a reasonable amount of it you eat a lot of it you can obviously go and experiment as much as you want to with your own recipes you can go and change it you can use any combination of these spices it's entirely based on your taste the two things that you just absolutely have to use is you have to use the salt in order to cure it and as i said the vinegar to preserve it if you stay in a place where if you have the opportunity to actually let your ball tongue dry without any sort of humidity or any way for it to spoil then quite frankly you don't even need to use the vinegar then the vinegar just becomes something that you use for taste so now that that's done i'm gonna put these meat sticks on the drying rack i'm gonna take my spice and then the same way as before i'm going to spice these quite aggressively to try and get as much of this taste onto my bottom because i want as much of it to absorb as i possibly can i'll turn these guys around and i'll spice them on all the other sides when i come back you'll see me uh start hanging the bottom up to dry right the last step in making the bull tongue is actually hanging it up so we're gonna get ready now to put it onto the hooks and then hang it up now in order to dry the bolt on some people use a bolt-on box there's lots of videos that will show you how to build a bolt-on box if you stay in a dry place like denver colorado where i live you can actually just hang the bottom up somewhere in a cool dry place because the humidity is so low that the built-up will actually dry out if you're in a place where there is a lot of moisture in the air be careful because you don't want the bolt on to spoil otherwise if you're in a relatively dry place make sure that it's nice and cool maybe use a fan to blow some air across the meat so that it can dehydrate quickly but from here you're going to use little bolt on hooks if you don't have biltong hooks the thing that i've used in the past are paper clips where you just literally open the paper clip up makes it into a little s shape and you hang it on i'm going to hook these bolt-ons onto my hooks as such i'll do the whole batch and then we're going to go hang them up downstairs now that we've got our bolt on spiced and it's been lying for about two hours we're ready to hang it up i'm just using my hooks i'm going to be hanging out all the pieces that i made made onto my built-on drying rack again if you live in a place where you need to use a bolt-on box that's fine ultimately all you want is you want somewhere that's nice and cool and dry where the bolt on can hang for a few days and then we can start to eat it and that gives us all of our biltong which will be ready to eat probably in about three or four days depending on the weather [Music] foreign [Music] you

Channel: Glen Bryant

Views: 2,693

Keywords: Biltong, Cured Meat, Dried Beef, South Africa, Meat Snacks, Biltong in the USA

Id: TR-KfkXI-7A

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020