THE FOOD DEHYDRATOR (PART TWO)

Beef Jerky.

So....We have had many meat adventures (More on that later).  By far the easiest set it and forget it thing that I have ever made has been Beef jerky.  Before I begin on the how to I want to first say that my wife and I enjoy beef jerky from time to time.  It is great on road trips.  We like the chewy salt spicy kind, organic if we can get it and preferably something with a kick.  With all that in mind finding good quality beef jerky is hard to find.  When you do find it is off the chart expensive.  It doesn't really make sense.  It is sooooooo cheap to make.  Personally I believe the cost is in the craptastic preservatives/chemicals they use to keep it "Fresh".

Again I am sure we are doing something "wrong" so true jerk-heads will probably have "issues" with this.  I believe that this produced far superior jerky than I have ever tasted EVER.  Different strokes for different folks I suppose. 

This is what we did:

Step one

Get some meat!  The leaner the meat the better.  If you can help it find meat with no fat or very little. When you buy said meat it will probably be from the local grocer.  Grocery store cow is what I used but if your pockets are deep you can choose to go to an actual butcher.  Have the butcher trim off all the fat.  Matter of fact you can have them do step two for you as well.....Richie Rich!

Step two

Take your meat out of its wrapping. Throw that thing in the freezer.  I would give it a couple of hours.  You don't want your meat frozen but you want it stiff.  This stiffness makes it easy to cut into thin strips.  Sometimes good grocery stores or butchers sell trimmings or beef strips for stir fry.  This is PERFECT for making jerky.  You will most definitely have to trim the fat.  The reason for trimming the fat is simple.  It goes rancid in the drying process.  The slices should be less than 1/4" thick and long-ish. You can purchase a nice 2 pound steak for five bucks this will yield about one 1/2 pound of jerky. 

Step three

Create a seasoning for your meat.  So there are different schools of thought with this.  One school is DRY RUB.  I failed out of the dry rub school.  I believe that it is reserved for dry aging for long periods of time or for my one and only secret BBQ recipe (more on that later).  The second school of thought is marinade.  I got an A+ in marinade.  We made two flavors of jerky.  The first was a soy sauce sesame seed brown sugar recipe. 

for 1 pound of meat

Mix:

- 1 cup of soy sauce

- 1/4 cup of brown sugar

- 1 table spoons of ginger

- 1 table spoon of garlic powder

- 1 teaspoon of liquid smoke (I used hickory)

- 1 teaspoon of sesame seeds



The other version we made was a coffee and red pepper flake version


- 1/2 cup of soy sauce

- 1 cup of STRONG coffee (we used Bustelo)

- 1 table spoons of ginger

- 1 table spoon of garlic powder

- 1 teaspoon of liquid smoke (I used hickory)

- 1/2 table spoon of red pepper flakes (or more)

- 1 teaspoon of white pepper

- 1 table spoon of organic hot sauce


Step four

I used a tupperware container but you can get creative with a ziploc or platter or bowl or whatever.  You just need to submerge your meat in the marinade. Usually the longer you marinade the better.  If you leave the meat in the marinade for more that four hours the jerky will be too salty to eat.  Watch the clock.  The ingredients are not that expensive but I HATE wasting food.  Eating super salty beef jerky is kind of like mouth torture. 


Step five

Break out old trusty.  The trick the the dehydrator is leaving space between the pieces.  Do not over lap or touch pieces. This will ensure that everything will get dried.  Take the meat out of the marinade and pat it dry.  The dryer the meat the faster it will dehydrate.  Place the meat evenly on the racks.  The meat is going to shrink by more than fifty percent. This is normal.  Pro-tip:  I would lay down paper towels under the racks while I was laying down the meat.  Mostly, because I did not want to wipe out the base of the dehydrator at the end. 

Step six

Wait.  I waited almost 48 hours with our first batch to ensure that is was "safe".  This was way too long.  I would say that between 5 - 8 hours per pound is enough.  The dehydrator is really just a slow cooker.  So if you think that you would cook a 5 pound roast for like 8 hours a small thin 1 pound portion of meat shouldn't take that long.

Step seven

Enjoy your spoils.  We went through jerky phase and made like 20 pound of jerky in a week. By the next week it was gone. My wife made me stop.  It is like meat crack.   I bought a middle of the road vacuum sealer and some food grade dry gel packs and started giving them away. 

THE FOOD DEHYDRATOR

Welcome to our food blog. 

(Disclaimer: We started this blog just to record what we have done. I am sure we are doing certain things the wrong way.  Anything we do on the blog, you can try at home.  We are not claiming to be experts.  Please follow proper health and safety practices when preparing food.  Enjoy. -Arthur)

Food is yummy.  We love it.  Sometimes a little too much.

We have been doing food projects for a long time now and have been recording it all. Our memory cards and smart phones are full.  We are finally offloading it all and putting it online

BACKGROUND

Since we moved to New York five years ago we have been inspired by many things food related.  Lately, our access to fresh organic food and great restaurants has been off the chart.  Often times we feel as though we have dove head first into food valley.  Our ever expanding waistline is proof of our insatiable appetite for food and how it is made.

Here and there things have connected our food projects with our love of eating out.  First this incredible set of books that a friend introduced us to (Modernist Cuisine).  It is pretty much food porn.   We have totally fallen in love with the mind of a chef tv show.  We watched every episode, twice.  Also every dinner party we go to we have had to bring our A game.  It seems like everyone around here is a culinary genius.  Much different than our back yard BBQs back home (even though we have a soft spot for BBQ).  We have had to step things up quite a bit to keep up with the Joneses.  We are always trying to one up each other.  Truthfully, more so than anything else we have been influenced by our friends (you will see them in some of our photos) who's mantra has always been "NO PROCESSED FOOD!"  Food is so much better when you make it yourself. 

The title of the blog really comes from the range of food we consume.  From the low brow flat top grease burger to the high end saffron infused black truffle ragu, the blog should be titled "FROM Cheetos to Caviar!"  We envision the blog to be part review, part how to and part experimentation.  We hope to have guest bloggers and encourage suggestions.

Combining all of this with the bountiful Hudson Valley makes for great adventures in culinary arts..... With out further adieu....for your reading pleasure I give you our first post. 

THE FOOD DEHYDRATOR (part one)

So we got a food dehydrator a while back and we have been using it non-stop. After thinking about all of the obvious choices with fruit etc we decided to experiment a bit. So we decided to make our own onion and garlic powder (inspired by chef Rene Redzepi's cucumber powder). Very simple and it makes a world of difference! You can actually taste the garlic and onion!!  Really....it is AMAZING how much better this is than store bought crap.

So this is what we did.  First, we gathered our supplies.  Onions. CHECK! Garlic CHECK! Food processor. CHECK!  Food dehydrator. CHECK!  Next we halved and peeled the onions.  Then with the "chopper" blade on the processor, we sliced them up.  After they were sliced things got a bit blurry (tears).  We placed a layer of sliced onions on each layer of the dehydrator.  Our machine is the cheapo model.  There is no low or high setting.  It is just on or off.  So we switched it on then waited....and waited....and waited.  There was a lot of crying.  The whole house filled with onion vapor. We left it overnight (about nine hours).

The onions were done when you could take a piece out and it would snap or crush with very little effort.  If they are still bendy turn it back on and come back in an hour.  Once it was completely dry we put it back in the food processor, switched to a normal blade and buzzed it all up.   We did the same with the garlic.  We bought pre-pealed garlic just to make life easier.  I actually hand chopped it then dehydrated it.   Again totally great! 

Just a few tips: 

1. leave the house when the onion is drying.  It is bad enough cutting the onions. When you shove them in the dehydrator the whole house feels like a tear gas grenade went off.  IT BURNS!

 2. Course chop everything. Our Dehydrator has big holes in it and everything finely chopped would fall to the bottom.  The bigger the better.

3. After everything is dry and you chop it up add a pinch of salt to extend the shelf life of the final product.  It goes bad quickly without the salt (four to five weeks)

 4. Buy a coffee grinder that you will only use as a spice grinder.  This makes a big difference grinding things to a powder. Grinding it finer you can put it in a shaker which makes it more accessible when cooking.  It sucks when the chunks clog it up when you are trying to add it to something on the fly.  

5. Make sure to label your containers.  After dehydrating they look almost identical from the outside of the container.  Only opening by opening it will you be able to tell which one is which.  I actually gave up and combined the two to make a super seasoning.  It is rare that I would ever use one and not the other.