Miasmatic Review

Making meat sticks.

Over the weekend I ended up making two batches of jerky. The first was just your regular style of jerky, which turned out decently. I’ve had better, but it’s not bad. For the second batch, it was time to change things up a little. I decided to make pepperoni sticks. I figured it couldn’t be that much different from making regular jerky. For once I was right.

The hardest part was controlling the gun. After loading the jerky gun with the cured ground meat, I started making the sticks. I had a strong grip on the shaft as I squeezed the handle. All of a sudden, the meat was squirting everywhere. Apparently, I pulled harder then I thought. After wiping down the tray, I reloaded the gun for another round. The second time is the charm, right?

This time I was very gentle, and was able to lay long lines of the meat. After 20 minutes, I had all the trays fully loaded with the soon to be dried pepperoni snacks. Just like the last time it took about 6 hours for the soon to be snacks to finish. Again, I had to pat down the meat to get the excess grease off. This was using the leanest ground beef I could find, I’d hate to see what it would be like with a fattier meat.

After the drying process, I put the pepperoni snacks on paper towels to dry for a couple of hours. Again, I wanted to remove the excess grease from the sticks. When they where finished “drying” I decided to sample one to see how it was. To be honest with you, these turned out pretty damn good. They actually taste like pepperoni flavored snack sticks. (This is not the same as actual pepperoni.) Since I made these after the “contagious” period, I let my wife and boys try some.

Clone, who is an avid pepperoni fan, couldn’t get enough of them. If I had left the bag where he could reach them, he would have eaten all of them by himself. When Ktreva slipped one of my meat sticks into her mouth, the look of surprise on her face told me all I needed to know. The moaning and MMmmmmMMMmmming told me she liked it. She kept trying to gobble up my meat the entire weekend.

I will have to say that my first experiments with making jerky and jerky like products have resulted in a success. Now I need to start pricing meat so that I can find the best deal for low-fat meats to make jerky.

I thinking of making a second batch to take with to the Wolf park. For the us, not the wolves.