Alright, I’m climbing the highest mountain in the contiguous 48 in less than a week.
I need carbs, protein, and the hopes of a thousand children.
Let’s focus on the first two. Alton Brown will help me climb this mountain.
First, his homemade granola. Detailed elsewhere, and not to be replicated here. Detailed here.
Second, jerky. I like his recipe. And I like the Whys of his recipe.
But I have one cow. And one cow has only so much flank steak, which his recipe demands.
Most butchers use top round for jerky, because it’s cheap and vaguely low fat (and fat will make jerky turn rancid, defeating the point of jerky).
Top round is low enough fat, but lacks the grain structure of flank. If you slice flank with the grain, when you remove the moisture, the muscle fibers shrink along predictable, established vectors. In other words, they grow shorter. But they’re still a continuous piece of food.
With top round, however, that muscle fiber is sliced differently. It isn’t a single, continuous piece. So it winds up thinner and more brittle than flank.
I’m keeping it in a zip-top bag, however, and will eat it in a few days. So I don’t care. I can eat dust if I have to. And I have more round than Liberace has sequins. Let’s dessicate some top round.
I use AB’s generic jerky recipe. Ordinarily, I’d double his liquid smoke and red pepper amounts, because I enjoy smoke and red pepper. But this top round is grass fed. It’s my first time working with it, so, again, this is a control experiment. I’ll stick to the recipe.
So I marinate, and then I strap it to a box fan between furnace filters. I differ from AB in this respect, in that I use paper towels as a moisture buffer between the furnace filters. In other words, fan-filter-papertowel-meat-papertowel-filter, repeat ad infinitum. The towels impede airflow, but you aren’t stuck picking filter fragments off your meat. I’ll take that trade.
It also takes longer. AB says 8 to 12 hours. I say 10 to 15.
Yes, you could do this faster in a cold or hot smoker. Cold, maybe four hours. Hot (i.e. 225 degrees-y) as little as two. But I have a toddler, a mountain to prepare for, and houseguests. I need idiot-proof. I need fire and forget. And a box fan on meat is hard to wreck.
The result? Delicious, but suboptimally formed. Smaller, more delicate, yet equally delectable pieces of grass-fed, top round jerky than if you’d rocked some grain-fed flank. But, as I said, I’ll eat it with a straw. It isn’t a stick o’ beef… it’s a toothpick o’ beef. But it will be there when it counts.
Also, from my experience, it’s moister than I’m used to. This could be a function of either the cut (flank vs. top round) or the beast (grass vs. grain). Regardless, it’s chewy and lovely, and I’ll reserve judgement for a later date.
See you on top of the country…
