Scott got some jerky from a local butcher — something like twenty bucks, and he could have eaten it as a snack one night and been done. It was really good, though, and inspired me to research making our own. In an amazing coincidence, a local grocery store put a lot of eye of round on FlashFood, so I was able to get about 5kg (~11 pounds) of beef for $3/lb.
I made two different recipes — one with smokey guajillo peppers that I use for chili and one with hot pepper flakes. The base marinade was the same, though: for every 1.5 kg of beef, use 1 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 2 tbs garlic, 1/3 cup medium ground black pepper, and 1 cup of water. To one batch, I added about 1 tablespoon of red pepper flakes. To the other, I broke up and added pieces (including seeds) of two dried guajillo peppers.
I used the food slicer to slice the meat about 1/4″ thick (we prefer the thicker slices it turns out). Unfortunately, the clearance beef was pre-cut into medallions. Another ‘note for next time’ is to cut with the grain instead of across!
Tossed this in the marinade to coat well, then put it all into a glass food storage container, and left it in the fridge overnight.
The next day, I dried the slices off slightly and laid them out across the food dehydrator trays. I was able to “cook” it all in two batches.
Let the food dehydrator “cook” for about 6 hours at 165F, and we’ve got homemade beef jerky!
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