Our hunting-mad neighbors Sam and Sandra — who I swear must take down a small battalion of furry, four-legged creatures each season — went out and shot us two deer. TWO DEER. Which means only one thing, friends: It’s jerky time at our house!!
I love venison jerky. It is, I think, a perfect protein. I’d much prefer tearing into a piece of jerky over a package of processed crackers any day. Does admitting this make me sound like a cracker? Mmm, yes. But I put jerky right up there with smoked sausage, my other favorite succulent foodstuff.
How we make jerky:
First, Jake helped Sam butcher the deer. Sam is an expert butcher. Jake is a butchering neophyte. He can barely cut his own hair and he has a buzz cut! (Ha ha! That’s a joke, sweetie. And with my current botched ‘do, I’m not exactly one to talk) Seriously, Jake might have accidentally discarded the tenderloins had it not been for Sam’s careful tutelage.
Then Jake brought over what felt like 200 pounds of steaks and cuts to our house, where we proceeded to slice the cuts into very thin strips using our other neighbors Bill and Ellen’s meat slicer (processing deer is serious business around here; in the country, meat slicers are as ubiquitous as toasters.)
One of many trays of deer meat, luscious deer meat
The jerkying took place did in our mud room-slash-distillery-slash-laundry room-slash-grotto gateway-slash-butchery. We don’t, for reasons too boring to go into, heat this room. Last night it was 15 degrees. Ergo, the room was freezing. It truly felt like a meat locker! We both donned our insulated Carharrt overalls and proceeded to slice every last cut of deer reserved for jerky into strips, roughly 20-40 pounds in all? By the end of it, we were both close to succumbing to hypothermia, the cutting table was covered with muck and meat, but we had bowl after glorious bowl of this:
Doesn't it look appetizing? Not.
Making jerky is a little like canning in that it can be a time sensitive operation; once you start the process, you can’t stop until the very end or risk spoiling the meat, and you can only work in batches.
I took the contents of this bowl, which weighed roughly 8 pounds, dumped them in an extra large ziploc bag and covered it with my favorite spicy jerky marinade:
- 1 1/2 cups soy sauce
- 3/4 cup lime juice
- 1/2 cup vinegar
- 1/4 to a 1/2 cup crushed red peppers (I like it hot!)
- 3 teaspoons garlic powder
Smoosh it all around until all the deer pieces are completely coated, seal the bag and refrigerate for 24 hours.
We stored the remaining unmarinated jerky meat in freezer bags, then used our new $170 FoodSaver vacuum sealer to suck the air out of all the bags, and stashed them all in the freezer. This way, I can make jerky at my leisure, instead of having to make it all at once like I did last year.
Tonight I’ll remove the jerky pieces from the marinade and begin the dehydration process using our Nesco dehydrator. [Small interruption: Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd be the kind of person to own both a vacuum sealer and a food dehydrator?!?!!] Sometime around 2 am tonight, the drying pieces of meat should look something like what you see below, but they won’t be fully dried until mid-morning tomorrow.
I already know what I’m having for breakfast: Jerky-n-eggs!
Will keep you posted.
