Off the "beaten path" jerky

I've been making a lot of jerky recently. Over time I have been moving the cooking temperature down and increasing the total time. I like the product taste and texture better. The last was smoke at 150 2 hr with the door open an inch 4 hours with door closed. Then holding it for 6 hours 140 in my CS 105 (Now 150). About half the time with the door ajar. I try to shoot for a yield (dryness) of 45-50% of fresh weight. The recipe I normally use is a slightly modified Kevi's recipe from a CS jerky search.

I recently did a small batch following a show on Food Network where AB just used a box fan and furnace filters. There was too much back pressure in the filters I bought so that didn't work well, so I shifted it to disposable aluminum fish grills from Wally World, in between my 105 grates with the whole thing suspended over my rib rack. It worked fine and dried it that way in about 12 hours. His recipe uses bacically soy sauce and Worscestershire sauce with a little honey and pepper. Not all that bad, but I kicked up the black pepper a bit, in place of his red pepper flakes (which I don't like) and it was a bit too much, but still very good.

For meat I now only use special trim (many times no waste at all) from my local wholesale grocery supply. It is at this time about $1.90 a pound which gives you great jerky you made yourself for less than $4. The meat is basically the trim from flank steaks as best as I can tell and I cut most of it across the grain which definitely changes it chewyness, and this is less apparent when you lower the cooking temperature also and keep everything below 190. If I had a commercial slicer I would probably give knuckle a try, which I would guess is what the slabs that are sold in local meat markets.

I bought a piece of jerky at a place in Spokane where my parents used to by their meat, and there texture was that of low temperature, which sort of disolves rather than breaks apart. A more old fashioned sun dried type of texture.