Nutrition
| Per 100 g | Per 1 oz (28 g) | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy | 380 kcal | 108 kcal |
| Protein | 54.1 g | 15.3 g |
| Fat | 13.2 g | 3.7 g |
| saturated | 4.8 g | 1.3 g |
| Carbohydrate | 8.2 g | 2.3 g |
| sugars | 3.3 g | 0.9 g |
| Fibre | 0.6 g | 0.2 g |
| Sodium | 2009 mg | 570 mg |
Estimated from the ingredients, for the finished dried product. Actual values vary with the produce you use and how far you dry it.
Ingredients
Instructions
- Eye of round is the cut to learn on. It is almost pure muscle, it comes as one long even cylinder, and there is very little to trim, which removes most of the ways a first batch goes wrong. Lamb leg and venison haunch behave the same way.
- Freeze the joint until a knife meets resistance rather than sinking in. This is the difference between strips you cut and strips you saw.
- Slice across the grain at 6 mm. Going with the grain gives a chewier result that some people prefer, but the whole batch has to go one way or the other — mixed, half of it finishes before the other half.
- Whisk the soy, Worcestershire, steak sauce, liquid smoke, pepper, garlic, onion and salt together until the salt has dissolved. Undissolved salt sits at the bottom of the bag and seasons four strips out of thirty.
- Turn the strips through the marinade so every face is wetted, then leave them covered in the fridge for a day. Squash the bag about and turn it over once part way through; the strips at the bottom are otherwise sitting in all of it.
- Shake each strip as you lift it out and lay them on the trays with daylight between them. A pool of marinade under a strip glues it to the mesh.
- Dehydrate at 71 °C for 7 hours. This is a food-safety setting rather than a texture one, because the beef goes into the machine raw.
- Bend a strip once it has cooled. It should crack along the bend and show white fibres without parting; no red should remain anywhere in it.
- Get the batch completely cold before it is sealed. On the shelf in a jar it is a fortnight of snacking, vacuum-sealed a couple of months, and frozen the best part of a year.
