The Perfect Hiking Snack : Jerky

When most people think of making their own Jerky they then think of expensive food dehydrators and hours of laborious work. Well, you don't need a food dehydrator and you don't need to spend hours working hard to make delicious jerky at home. This Jerky is super cheap, very good for you, and it actually taste like meat!

First, we must pick our meat. While we can do this with any meat, we're going to go with steak for the basic recipe. As you learn how to make your own jerky, you can mess around with other meats. Because we are drying this meat, we don't need to buy the most expensive cuts. We can look for quantity over quality, which is nice. Whatever meat you choose you want to trim as much fat from it as possible. Fat doesn't dry out too well, it becomes gritty and chewy. Once you've trimmed the fat park the meat in the freezer for about an hour, just so we can cut it better later.

As that freezes we want to make a marinade for the meat. I like to keep this as simple as possible. I take half a cup of my favorite barbeque sauce and a half cup of water. I whisk that together with pepper, salt, and a tablespoon of vinegar.

Now is a good time to prep your oven. We are going to be doing our drying right on the oven rack, so make sure it's nice and clean. If you have an old oven rack that you just cannot clean you can cover each wire bar with tinfoil. It's a little time consuming, but it's fine. We need the airflow that comes from the racks, so don't just use a sheet of tinfoil. On the bottom of the oven we want to put a pan or a sheet of tinfoil to catch all the droppings that will definitely fall.

Once the meat is a little stiff, we want to cut. On the meat you are going to see white marbling, this is the fat we couldn't trim. The direction of the fat, the way it faces, is called the grain. We want to cut the meat against the grain, not with it. Make the cuts very thin and try to make them uniform, so they all dry out at the same time.

When all your meat is cut, place it in your marinade, cover it, and pop in the refrigerator for an hour. This is a very important step. The meat is going to soak in a lot of tasty flavor and then that flavor will sweeten while it dries, which is why our marinade was diluted with water. And the marinade lets us buy cheaper cuts of meat.

After your meat spends in an hour in the chill chest, it is time to layer it out and 'cook'. Take your prepared oven rack and bring it to your sink. Lay it down so the extra marinade can drip off into the sink as we lay out our soon-to-be jerky. Place the meat down so it's not touching another piece of meat and has a little bit of room.

Now it's time to 'cook' our meat. Place the rack into the oven and set it to the lowest setting. Most ovens go down to 170 degrees. But we want to keep the air flow up so we are actually going to peg the oven door open. You can do this by placing a large wooden spoon or spatula in between the door and the oven wall, so it's just open a little bit.

The last step is the hardest step. We have to wait for at least 3 hours. After 3 hours take out some jerky and twist it. If it bends and is a little bit greasy, that means you have more drying to do. You want to the meat to fray when you twist it, shredding apart. Sometimes it can take up to six hours to reach that point.

Once done, you will have delicious jerky that was easy to make and very cheap. In general an ounce of Jerky costs you about 2 bucks. Here you can make a pound (16 ounces) of jerky for about 4 bucks. Pretty good deal, don't ya think?