How to make really good jerky
By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Feb. 13, 2004
Lewis and Clark might never have completed their journey from St. Louis to Oregon if the hunters they took along had not furnished them with deer meat along the way. For four months, while they wintered in Oregon, they had little to eat except deer venison. It is likely that some of the meat that sustained them was jerky.
Meat that could not be consumed before spoiling was often "jerked" and saved for later consumption. Jerking, the name perhaps coming from the original way muscles were torn from a carcass, typically means cutting the meat into strips thin enough to dry in the sun. Sometimes the drying meat was smoked by pioneers and Indians, thus speeding the drying process, enhancing curing and adding flavor.
Today, meat is jerked commercially and sold as snacks. Jerky is a good source of protein and has practically no fat.
The big advantage of jerky is that it is very light weight, therefore ideal for back packers, hikers, hunters and others who need to carry nutritious food long distances.
There are as many ideas about how to make good jerky as there are those who profess to be jerky experts. I found Texans to be especially uncompromising in this regard. One Texan asserted that anyone who messed with jerky by putting anything at all on it before drying it should be charged with a felony and banned from the Lone Star State.
He would at least discuss jerky-making with folks who rolled the strips in pepper (never salt) before drying, but was loathe to be seen in public with such deviates. All other jerky concepts were simply blasphemous.
Touchy subject
At the suggestion of marinating the raw meat, the man would snort and bite his lip and stomp out of the room. Don't question a Texan's jerky or pinto bean recipe. Just look wide eyed and thank him profusely for his wisdom as if it were coming directly from God instead of just His anointed jerky/pinto bean expert. Then go fix them like you want to.
Texans, and others out west, have one thing on us jerky makers; dry weather. Sunshine and low humidity are needed to make good jerky the old way. But with dehydrators and some innovative recipes, we make fine jerky over here in the wet country.
I have made and eaten a lot of jerky using the above mentioned Texan's method. It has nourished me, or at least killed my appetite, over many a mile in the back country. But I can't say I really enjoyed the taste. When I covered it with pepper and just a touch of salt before drying, it tasted better.
Later, experimenting with various other coatings prior to drying, I had mixed results. I usually got either too much of the seasonings or too little. It was a rare hunk of my jerky that really had me reaching for more.
Then one day I tried a bite of jerky that really tasted like I always wanted jerky to taste. Good. It came from the kind hand of Billy Morgan's beautiful wife, Sacheen. His jerky not only tasted great, but it did not break any teeth, as some of mine often attempted to do, and it was uniformly cured, as none of mine ever had been.
I tried another bite to verify my initial impression and then I called Billy to attempt to learn his secret. He generously provided his recipe and here it is.
The recipe
Cut strips of venison an eighth of an inch thick. Meat from a good cut, like the hind quarter (incorrectly called the ham by many of us) will make the best jerky.
Buy yourself a bottle of Wal-Mart brand A-1 Classic Marinade. It comes in the kind of bottle that salad dressing comes in. Pour the whole thing into a bowl and add a bottle of tomato sauce. Stir it and put your meat into it.
Cover the bowl with foil and let it stay 24 hours in the refrigerator. Remove the strips and put them into a dehydrator overnight, or until they are dry enough to bend stiffly but not break. That's it.
I watched Jim Zumbo slice venison for jerky the other day on his television show. He had the neatest trick for cutting uniform slices. (Everybody except me probably already knows about this and has been using it for years.) He had glued a little square box of narrow wooden strips that were the thickness of the jerky he wanted say an eighth or three sixteenths of an inch onto a larger cutting board. The box (or rectangle) measured about ten inches by six or seven inches.
By laying the chunk of meat to be jerked into the square and laying your knife flat atop the two long sides of the box, he cut each strip the same thickness. Just keep the knife flat down on the box and move it from end to end for each slice.
Now, if I can ever find a blind and deaf deer that has lost its sense of smell, I plan to turn a lot of venison into Billy Morgan's jerky.
