Nutrition
| Per 100 g | Per 1 oz (28 g) | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy | 378 kcal | 107 kcal |
| Protein | 55.3 g | 15.7 g |
| Fat | 13.3 g | 3.8 g |
| saturated | 4.8 g | 1.4 g |
| Carbohydrate | 6.4 g | 1.8 g |
| sugars | 3.7 g | 1.1 g |
| Fibre | 0.3 g | 0.1 g |
| Sodium | 2268 mg | 643 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
- 2.2 kg thinly sliced beef
- 2 1/2 cans of coke
- 17 cloves crushed garlic
- 1 1/4 cups soy sauce
- 7 1/4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- 4 3/4 tablespoons ketchup
- 1 1/2 tablespoons red hot sauce
- 2 1/2 teaspoons fresh lime juice
Instructions
- Crush the garlic rather than chopping it, and leave the pieces coarse. Crushed cloves release their oil into the liquid; chopped ones stick to the meat and scorch into bitter flecks on the tray.
- Open the cola and let it go flat before it goes near the bowl. The bubbles carry the marinade up the sides of the bag and over the bench the moment you seal it.
- Stir the cola, soy, Worcestershire, ketchup, hot sauce and lime juice together and taste it. It should be aggressively salty on a spoon — the meat takes up perhaps a tenth of what is in the bowl, and a marinade that tastes balanced makes a jerky that tastes of nothing.
- Submerge the beef and keep it in the fridge for the afternoon, turning the bag over once. Cola brings acid as well as sugar, and beef left in it for a full day goes soft and mealy at the edges.
- Drain the strips in a colander and pat both faces dry. Ketchup and cola each leave a syrup that will not dry off, and a tacky strip collects every crumb in the cupboard.
- Arrange them so no strip touches another and dry at 68 °C for 7 hours. The setting is high because raw beef is going in, so the heat is doing a safety job as much as a drying one.
- Test a cooled strip by folding it in half. It should whiten and crack along the fold; if it bends like leather and stays smooth, the middle is still wet.
- Store the cooled jerky in an airtight jar with a sheet of paper towel in it, a fortnight at room temperature or a year in the freezer. The towel catches the little sweat the sugar pulls out over the first few days, which is what turns a good batch mouldy.
