Korean Sweet & Spicy Beef Jerky Recipe for the Dehydrator - PepperGeek

hello and welcome to pepper geek my name is Calvin and today we're making sweet and spicy beef jerky we drew inspiration from Korean style food we have gochujang paste here and we have sesame oil you know we love experimenting in the kitchen only about 1 in 10 experiments comes out great but this is definitely one of them we have this new dehydrator that we've been drying out all sorts of fruits and vegetables with but we just recently discovered that we can make beef jerky and it's awesome feel free to follow along with me here but if you'd like a printable version of the recipe head over to pepper geek comm and search for beef jerky and you'll find all the information that you find in this video and then some so if you're new to making beef jerky there are three things that are gonna be the enemy of having your beef jerky lasts a long time number one is moisture so that's where the dehydrator comes in you don't need a dehydrator if you have an oven you can probably use that but there are some benefits to using an actual purpose-built dehydrator and the first is that this thing maxes out at 165 degrees Fahrenheit about 74 degrees Celsius and that's about what we're gonna use for making the beef jerky but it goes all the way down to 95 degrees Fahrenheit some ovens just don't go that low and we really want to avoid going too high with the temperature here the other is that this circulates the air inside of the dehydrator speeding up the process a lot of ovens don't have air circulation some do but ultimately you're gonna end up spending more time dehydrating if you're using an oven but it's possible for the purposes of this video we're gonna assume that you do have a dehydrator but just remember that you don't really need one but dehydrating is an essential part of making beef jerky you're taking out the moisture from the beef basically getting rid of all of that water that can cause the beef to spoil the second enemy for your beef jerky is going to be oxygen so you want to make sure that you store the beef jerky properly after you have finished dehydrating it and that means using something like a ball jar or freezer bags you don't want to go using like a normal baggie sandwich baggie and if you can get them get the little desiccant packets we'll show you what those look like in a little bit but those basically remove oxygen from the package and the third enemy and we're gonna get to that right now is fat so we're using a flank steak here this is one of the preferred cuts I can also use I of round top around or bottom round and those are typically a little bit cheaper than a flank steak but fat goes bad a lot faster than the meaty portions of the beef so you're gonna want to cut away any excess fat before you dehydrate and we'll also do some blotting to get rid of the fat during the dehydration process so with all that out of the way I'm gonna put this back into the freezer for about an hour so that it firms up and it'll be a lot easier for us to cut even slices when we're ready to marinate okay so this is sweet and spicy beef jerky gochujang paste and sesame oil bring out Korean style flavors and it's just so good it's better than anything I've ever had from the store it's my opinion it's my recipe but trust me it is it's so good so we start with soy sauce this is enough for about one pound of beef but feel free to double it or triple it if you're gonna do a bunch but we're doing two tablespoons of soy sauce to start one teaspoon of sesame oil two tablespoons of dark brown sugar packed 1/2 teaspoon each of garlic powder and onion powder if you want to use fresh garlic feel free we use two cloves last time for this recipe but we're using a half a teaspoon of garlic powder instead and for some more heat we're adding a half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper powder well heaping on that one that's fine and for the final ingredient we're using 1 teaspoon of gochujang hot pepper paste this is a fermented Korean paste it's sweet its savory it's mommy it's just all sorts of goodness you can find this at Korean market places you can you can also get it online so it looks like that it's pretty thick and that's our final ingredient let's get in there now we're just gonna whisk this together get it nice and incorporated you want to make sure all those ingredients obviously mixed together well so we're gonna set that aside and grab our beef okay so we've allowed this to sit in the freezer for about an hour hour and a half depending on the thickness of your cut and now it's it's really firmed up if you can see you can sort of see some crystals forming on it you don't want to freeze it all the way through you just want to get it to a point where it's a little more firm and easier to cut so when it comes to vfj key you can cut against the grain or with the grain we prefer to cut against the grain which is this direction with the grain would be basically in the same direction as the lines that you see on the beef when you cut against the grain like this though you end up with a more tender beef jerkey and that's that's just what we prefer if you want to have to chew on it you can you can cut with the grain so we're looking for about a quarter inch something like that so gonna want to use a very sharp knife and you kind of have to work quickly because your hands will end up warming up the beef and it'll become more and more difficult to work with you know we're gonna end up with really tender beef jerky that just sort of falls apart and is easier to chew sometimes we'll do a mix I mean you could cut half of it against the grain half of it with the grain if you want a little variety you know what yeah let's do the rest of it with the grain just so we can have an example and has this dehydrates it will shrivel up a little bit they won't be quite as thick these cuts are actually a little bit too long for my liking so I'm gonna cut them in half I think these are that's a much more manageable shape okay so we've prepared our meat here it is ready for the marinade and for that we're just gonna use a simple sandwich baggie I wouldn't store the finished product in a like this because oxygen can get through but for marinade it works just fine so we're gonna add about half the beef to the bag and then I'm gonna try to pour about half of the marinade in over that the reason I dig it up is because it can be a little bit hard in a bag like this to the coveralls so I'll do a little massage there better work it across all the beef and then we'll go and put the rest in now the rest of marinade just seal up the bag squeeze out most of the air and then we're just gonna massage okay and you want to just make sure that every bit of every piece of meat has some of the marinade on it you could put this in the fridge and marinade overnight but we're a little impatient we want our beef jerky today so we're gonna have it today and when I come back in about an hour this should I've had time to settle into the work itself into the meat and it'll be ready to head into the dehydrator so I'll see you soon all right so one hour has passed this is done marinating now and we're gonna take it out and lay it out on our dehydrator trays so this is an X caliber dehydrator I don't think they make this exact model anymore for whatever reason this one has four trays but they make larger ones with I think nine trays I'll leave a link in the description below to Amazon so you can see whatever models they do have but it's been great it's relatively quiet and it doesn't take up too much space and does a great job dehydrating so here's the trays you have this little plastic film that is like a mesh it allows the air to circulate above and below whatever it is you're dehydrating and they're pretty easy to clean after you're done so we're gonna lay out the beef strips I'm making sure that none of them are touching one another like so and I put a paper towel beneath the tray just to to stop up any of the liquid see nice and even and now we can put the trays in here and we're gonna set it to 165 for six hours total but we're gonna come back in about three hours and check on the beef we're gonna dab away any of the excess fat that comes to the surface so we're back it's been about three and a half hours and we're gonna take a peek coming along pretty nicely you can see that the fat has kind of turned into liquid in some spots like here makes it much easier to stop up the fat and remove even more of the fat that's inside of the meat so we're just gonna go through do this to all the different pieces and continue dehydrating for another three hours potentially more because I cut these pretty thick all right so our beef has finished the hydrating it took about seven hours all in all this is cut a little bit thicker than I did in the past try to aim for about a sixth of an inch to a quarter of an inch but if you like it on the thicker side it's just gonna take a little bit longer allow it to cool for at least an hour you want it to come to room temperature before you run your first test and the first test is going to be the bending test you just want to take a piece of the jerky bend it slightly and see if it cracks in half you want to see this type of cracking right here you don't want it to just snap in half but you also don't want it to just Bend like it's raw beef if it's still too pliable give it another hour in the dehydrator and you want it to come to this point right here so once you think your beef is done dehydrating it's time to move on to storage we want to use some sort of airtight container you can use a freezer baggie but ideally you use something like this a ball jar with a sealable lid we're just gonna put all the beef into this jar okay we have a full jar of beef jerky I'm leaving one out for me to taste test and the last thing I'm gonna put in here is a desiccant packet and then you can buy these on Amazon it's basically just a silica gel packets that you find in foods that you buy at the store make sure you get food safe silica gel packets they're pretty affordable I'll leave a link in the description below but I'm just gonna put one of these packets in with our beef jerky and this just absorbs oxygen again that's one of the things that's gonna make your beef jerky spoil faster and there you have it why don't we try some huh hmmm so good the sweetness hits right off the bat nice and tender cut against the grain just a touch of spiciness you could add a lot more cayenne pepper if you want but very good I hope you make this and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do so how long will beef jerkey last it's gonna vary based on how long you dehydrate the longer you dehydrate typically the longer it's gonna last if you don't open it it should last one to two months but once you open it you should consume it within about a week hey thanks for watching pepper geek I hope you enjoyed this if you did leave a like subscribe to our channel for more like this and hey if you actually made this beef jerky come back to this video or on our website pepper geek calm and leave a comment telling us what you thought I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and hey don't forget to go over to pepper geek calm and enter our monthly hot sauce giveaway we give away a free hot sauce every single month you can enter every single month all you have to do is sign up for our weekly email newsletter and you're signed up so thanks for watching I hope you're doing well and we'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Pepper Geek

Views: 11,991

Rating: 4.9066148 out of 5

Keywords: spicy beef jerky, korean beef jerky, sweet and spicy beef jerky, spicy beef jerky recipe

Id: WPsmzYtyhsY

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020