Beef Jerky

I have been wanting to make my own beef jerky for a while.  I never did it because I was not keen on trying to dry it in the oven.  When we bout our dehydrator a while back, that eliminated that obstacle.  So the other day I made beef jerky.

Too a sirloin steak,

cleaned the fat and stuff from it and sliced it thin, approximately 1/4 inch.

Made a teriyaki marinade, poured it over the strips, and let it do it's thing overnight.

In the morning I took it out of the marinade, dried it off, and loaded it into the dehydrator and turned it to 155 degrees.

Six hours later I had my very own, homemade, no bad preservative added, beef jerky.

The picture doesn't do it justice.  It is very nomalicous.

Currently Listening

Free Me
by All India Radio

Dehydrated Watermelon

First post in six months.  Woohoo!  I've been slacking.  Well, not really.  I just grew tired of blogging about ho-hum food all the time.

Well, since I lasted updated, I have a new job!!  I am Chef Garde Manger at The Manor House Restaurant at Poplar Spings Inn and Spa in Casanova, VA.  No more ho-hum food for me.  Sorry, Black Bear Bistro.  You were good to me for 3 years, but it was time to get away.  No offense, but compared to what we are doing at Poplar, I wasn't getting any good experience at the Bistro.  No offense to them.  They have a good thing going I guess.

Anyway, on to the real matter and something that is not ho-hum...dehydrated watermelon.  Yes, you heard it right...dehydrated watermelon.

I took a perfectly good watermelon, cut it and sliced it into thin wedges.

It would have been a lot easier to use a seedless watermelon because I had to scrape out all the seeds.  Time consuming.

I loaded the wedges into our Excalibur dehydrator and turned it to 135 degrees overnight.

In the morning I had dehydrated watermelon.
Behold!!

Only bad thing about this, the wedges stuck to the racks.  I figured out the only way to remove them was to roll them into cigars.  So I ended up with dehydrated watermelon cigars.

Some of them are a bit spicy because the last thing I dried on the racks was hot peppers, but they are still good.  Very sweet.  All the sweetness concentrated into the little bit of the watermelon that dried up.  Yum yum!  Don't think I will ever do this again though.  Too time consuming.  I think I will venture into drying other melons.  Hopefully cantaloupe is not as sticky when dehydrated.

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Wait for the Siren
by Project 86