Monday, 15 June 2009

Biltong/Jerky batch 3

Batch 2 was much more successful. It's actually edible and has been part of my morning snack this week.
This batch was primarily soy sauce based, using steak I had cut into slices first. I can't remember what cut of meat I used, but it wasn't rump steak this time.

The flavour is still not what I'm after, so I'm trying this recipe this weekend with some topside steak
http://www.biltongmakers.com/biltong13_recipes3_connoisseur.html


Hopefully that will get me something closer to the true biltong taste.
Definitely much closer to the biltong taste, but it wound up being sweet, which is just wrong! Or American.
When I'm layering the meat and sugar and salt in the dish a little bit of sugar goes a long way, while the salt barely contributes. I'll be be barely dusting it with sugar and pouring the salt on. It doesn't soak in as much as I'd thought.

Zoning in on the correct flavour.

4 comments:

TexasPatrick said...

Or "American"?

Craig Massey said...

Wondered if that might get a response. :-)

Biltong, the dried meat I'd had, is very definitely a savoury taste. Very salty, varying degrees of spiciness. I was quite shocked that a lot of what I tried as jerky in the states was very sweet tasting to my palate.

Heresy!

I understand quite a lot of jerky is quite savoury and some is quite deliberately fiery, but I've never gotten over the idea that the American fascination with putting sugar in everything had even corrupted jerky.

I'm investigating sending you some biltong. It looks like it should be possible, NZ manufacturers do ship vacuum sealed packs overseas, I just need to confirm that the place that makes the biltong I like can do vacuum sealing. I don't want to send you the second rate stuff. If you don't like it I want it to be because you genuinely don't like it, not because I sent you bad biltong.

JTM said...

Hey Metric,

I've been following your questions about training and coaching at BX. Hopefully I can learn something from your experiences since I'm trying to get things right myself now that I coach or help coach on wednesdays at lightning.

Joel (JTM)

Craig Massey said...

That's cool Joel.

Yeah, it's a whole new ballgame. The same as I do on the forum, but without time to think and with the group management thing thrown in. I can deal with people one-on-one fairly well, which is giving me some confidence and it's just the problems I've never had to solve in my own training that I trip over now. Running a class though is scary. When I relax I do OK, getting to that can be elusive.