Recipes for Writers: cheapest homemade jerky? Beef heart!
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Ingredients for this simple and easy homemade jerky are: heart meat, Bragg's Liquid Aminos (a soy sauce alternative - you can use soy sauce instead), powdered ginger, coarse black pepper, brown sugar, salt, and a dehydrator to dry it on. Also, a really sharp knife.
In keeping with the writing lifestyle, an ideal writer's recipe must be:
Cheap (because we are usually poor.) Low-stress (so as not to stress us out more than we already are), Healthy (to fuel our writing brains). And, preferably, something we can prepare once and eat for days or weeks after (to save on cooking time). Ladies and gentlemen, you can make jerky once and eat it for months.
If you eat meat you probably love beef jerky. But, store-bought jerky is expensive, and usually packed with preservatives. Making jerky from scratch is simple, but buying all that meat can be expensive, too.
Enter: beef hearts.
This may be the cheapest- and quite possibly the healthiest- meat to use for homemade jerky.
Now, if you think that looks disgusting, think again. Once you cut off that thin casing of fat the meat inside is rich and red and perfectly fat-free; if you buy it in a grocery store instead of a butcher's shop, the heart may already be sliced into more appealing chunks. (If this is the case, lament, because you'll miss the grisly fascination of slicing out heartstrings from inside the ventricles.) I discovered heart meat in college, when I browsed the meat sections and realized it was cheaper than the cheapest of the reduced-price beef cuts. Heart is delicious, highly nutritious, and (here in Montana, at least) a third of the price of steak. But, don't let the low price fool you: for nutritional value alone, heart meat is a steal. It's packed with iron and other nutrients, and is as low in fat as white-meat chicken. If you've never tried heart, there's no strong organ flavor (like liver) or greasy texture (like tongue) or stored toxins (liver again.) Just delicious red meat.
No wonder wolves go for the heart first.
So, learn from the wolves and indulge your inner carnivore. If you're feeling anemic, or just want some good on-hand ready-to-eat protein to fuel long nights of writing (for months to come) make a batch of beef heart jerky.
Note: the slicing of the hearts is time-consuming. I listen to audiobooks on headphones while cutting. Slicing meat for hours on end is the perfect brainless listening-task.
Second note: you'll need a dehydrator. If you've never dehydrated before, prowl craigslist. Used dehydrators come cheap.
Step 0: Dig out your dehydrator. (Make sure the racks are clean, and that it works when you plug it in.)
Step 1: Find heart meat. (At grocery stores with a good meat section, or any butcher's or meat shop.) I do jerky in big batches, and have the dehydrator running for a week at a time. For this, I get a box of 8 or 9 hearts - about 20 pounds of meat.
Step 2: Prepare marinade. For approximately 5 lbs of meat, mix 1 32-oz bottle of Bragg Liquid Aminos soy sauce alternative (or about 4 cups of soy sauce) with 2 1/2 cups brown sugar, 4 Tb powdered ginger, 4 Tb coarse-ground black pepper, and 1 tsp salt. Bragg Liquid Aminos are packed with soybeans' amino acids and super good for you; they're a healthier version of soy sauce, and I think they taste better. (I use liquid aminos as a healthy dressing on salads, too). Some grocery stores stock it, and all health food stores. The bottle looks like this:
image source huffingtonpost.com
Marinade can be reused to soak a second round of meat, the following day.
Step 3: Cut. Slice meat as thin as you can while still making jerky-sized pieces. I use a big finely-serrated knife. Aim for the thickness of a ruler, or of a house key, but don't stress the slicing thinness. Thicker pieces and chunks will all dry fine, they just take longer. If you're slicing from whole hearts, remove all the white fat casing from the outside, and all the heart strings from inside the ventricles. (Until this, I'd only ever heard of dragon heartstring as the core of Harry Potter's wand - I never knew hearts had actual heartstrings. They're incredibly strong, like super-thin nylon cord fused to the inside of the ventricle. Bodies are amazing.)
Heart strings
More heart strings, cut loose.
Heart strings are these tiny, slippery white strands that... keep the flaps closed in our heart. They're called 'chordae tendonae', the tendons connecting the valves to the heart muscle, and they're about 80% collagen, 20% elastin. These keep blood where it's supposed to be when our hearts are pumping, to maintain blood pressure, so our hearts can pump it out through our arteries. Every single time our heart beats, these little strings are working. For our whole lives. Isn't that crazy?
Anyway. Back to jerky.
Step 4: Soak sliced meat in marinade for 12-24 hours. (Longer won't hurt, if you've marinated more meat than can fit on the dehydrator in one batch. Marinating longer just makes it saltier.)
Step 5: Dehydrate. Lay meat flat on dehydrator racks and dry for 8-12 hours, depending on thickness. Dry until meat is no longer sticky, but preferably not so long that jerky strips shatter when you try to pry them off the racks (although there's nothing wrong with jerky being that dry, it's just incredibly annoying to pry it off the racks with a fork.)
All racks of the dehydrator filled with jerky, now ready to be lidded and plugged in to dry...
Step 6: Devour. Save for your own late nights or long trips, or give to fellow carnivorous friends.
As a note on preservation: I'm not sure how Bragg's Liquid Aminos compares to soy sauce for salt content. Both salt and dryness preserve the meat. You can easily carry this jerky around for a week in your backpack without it going bad, probably a lot longer. I've never had jerky spoil, and I've kept it in a car while camping for two weeks. But, best not to take chances. Always freeze all homemade jerky in ziploc bags, until you're ready to pull out a bag and eat it in the next week or two. Just in case.
Happy eating (and writing.)
-mlj
