jerky

Last summer as we were coming back from NM, we discovered a fantastic brand of jerky. Rachael picked up a single package in a Love’s travel stop. It was so good that when we came to the next Love’s she got a whole pound of it! It is honestly the best jerky I’ve ever had. I followed the web link on the package and just ordered a pound for us. Do you know how much dried meat you get in a pound!! Lots. Probably what would be several pounds of raw meat.

Now I want to tell you about it because I had a piece for breakfast and enjoyed it so much I want the world to know. Well at least the few people who read along here.

If you’ve never had jerky, real jerky, good jerky, you are missing a treat. Most of the stuff we get in stores around here is glorified lunch meat. It is chopped and compressed into uniform slices (sometimes even shaped to resemble a piece of natural meat) and dried. Some brands are shoved into little casings and sold a beef sticks. I guess there are brands that are real jerked meat, but most of them aren’t. I guess if you are starving it’s okay, but if you don’t like it, I don’t blame you.

Real jerky is real meat, trimmed of fat and sliced very thinly roughly cross grain and marinated briefly in a curing solution-usually salt. Originally it was sun dried or smoked over low fires. It isn’t really cooked exactly, but it doesn’t taste ‘raw’ either. The object is to dehydrate the meat quickly to retard any bacterial growth. Well-made jerky could be stored for weeks under dry conditions and will feed a person for many meals.

Jerky has become a popular snack food, but originally it was designed to be a method of storing vital nutrition and calories for periods of shortage or travel. You can’t toss a handful of real jerky in your mouth and chomp it like you do chips or popcorn. It is much too hard and tough. This is part of the reason why the processed and pressed types of jerky were developed. They are quicker and easier to consume. We are into instant gratification in our snack foods. Jerky doesn’t fit the bill.

I had a stick of jerky for breakfast this morning. I don’t know how much it weighed. It was a very thin slice about four inches long and an inch wide at its broadest part, but it tapered to points on each end, conforming to the shape of the natural muscle strip. I wondered, as I was stripping the thin shreds of fiber from the larger piece, how much the piece would have weighted in it unprocessed form. It took me about twenty minutes to eat the whole piece with my coffee.

You have to tear off a tiny strip of muscle fiber and hold it in your mouth until it is saturated enough to chew, so it takes a while. But when I finished that little strip of jerky I felt as satisfies as if I had eaten bacon and eggs. That’s the difference between real jerky and the processed stuff from the corner convenience store. It is a meal.

If you want good jerky I recommend you try Robertsons’ jerky (http://www.beefjerkynow.com/) They offer a variety of meat products including ham bacon and sausage. Check out the website and then try the jerky. If their ham and bacon are as good as their jerky, they are well worth the cost.

And if you’ve never eaten jerky or didn’t like it when you did, try a piece of Robertsons. It is almost like eating your mama’s roast in dehydrated form.