How to Make Homemade Beef Jerky

People of today still enjoy the convenience and taste of beef jerky. In todays market however, beef jerky can be expensive! For a decent quality, prepackaged beef jerky, the average price is about $4.00 for 2-3 ounces of meat. Making your own jerky is much cheaper and also, in my opinion, produces a much tastier jerky.

Making your own jerky is not as complex as you may think. You can make jerky with many different kinds of meat. I frequently make jerky with beef, turkey and salmon. Beef jerky can be made with cuts of beef or with ground meat. I prefer to use a beef brisket for my jerky, although in a pinch I have used pot roasts, London broil and steak cuts. A beef brisket can be bought trimmed (no fat) or untrimmed (fat is still on the brisket). I personally usually buy the untrimmed brisket for two reasons. One, because it's generally a little cheaper and two, after I cut the fat off I can boil it to make beef stock to freeze for recipes and feed the cooked fat to my dogs, which really helps to stretch my dollar.

HOW TO PICK A BRISKET

When buying an untrimmed brisket, you want to find one that doesn't have too much hard fat on it. When packaged, one side of the brisket is predominantly meaty. The other side of the brisket most often appears to be a solid piece of fat. It is the fatty side you need to check. When pressed, most of the fat should "give" to the pressure. There probably will always be a few very hard parts to it, but as long as it's not all over, it's OK. Every brisket will be fatty, but the less hard fat your getting, the more meat your getting. You don't want to waste your money buying fat! If you want to skip some messy work though, save yourself some trouble and just buy a trimmed brisket, because your next step is cutting all that fat off!

GETTING THE MEAT READY