Mystery Meat Jerky

Was it beef or was it venison?  I don’t know but it was good.  Some people said it was venison and some beef, and I have to tell you sometimes I wanted it to be venison and sometimes I wanted it to be beef, but it was not labeled and for the life of me I cannot remember whether those were venison or beef steaks I cut up to make jerky.  But whatever they were they got me hooked, jerky is going to be an fascination until I can get it just right, every time in whatever flavor I want.  So there will be more jerky posts, probably even some this weekend.

I started out by cutting my steaks up into about quarter inch this pieces of meat at a 30° angle across the grain of the meat.  This was fairly easy to do and using a larger than necessary knife made it even simpler.

Jerky Rub Ingredients

Once the meat was cut I mixed together a rub as follows.

Ingredients
1/4 c brown sugar
1/4 c kosher salt
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground ginger

Instructions
Blend together all ingredients in a small bowl being sure to get any clumps out of the brown sugar.

Once the rub was mixed together I then rubbed the rub into the meat, this amount of rub is good for about 1 1/2 pounds of meat.

Jerky on the Smoker

I then placed it on the smoker with NO water in the water pan at 155°F for 5 hours over a blend of hickory and mesquite using my PID controlled electric smoker.  Using the propane would have probably been too moist to get good jerky and the charcoal might have been a little tricky to maintain that temperature for such a long period of time.  The electric with the PID controller is just easy.   At this point it was still a little moist in the middle but chewy and very jerky like, it was really good.

Mystery Meat Jerky

Even as mystery meat the reviews have been good, people have liked it, most importantly I liked it so I will be making more jerky and posting about it as I learn new things.

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