- [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided in part by the R.E.

Synergy Foundation.

Content for the sustainable world.

G&C Foods, quality at every turn.

Pittsburgh Spice and Seasoning Company.

Making life taste better.

The Allen Family.

Robert, Ashley, Carol, and Fred.

And viewers like you.

(upbeat music) - I'm a son of a butcher.

- You might be a son of a butcher, but I am the original butcher.

- Some ask me, "What is the meat industry to you?"

For me, it starts at a place where my family runs a grocery, butcher shop, and a catering business.

I'm sure it's about the business side of things, but for me, at its core, it's a story about relationships.

(upbeat music) Hey, we're back with another episode of Son of a Butcher.

In this episode, we're going to show you how to make shelf-stable beef jerky.

I'm your host, AJ O'Neil.

- You SOB.

- And this is my dad, Gale O'Neil.

He's the original SOB.

So let's get started here.

Most of the time, you're going to get your jerky from lower value cuts.

In this case, it would be the round of the beef.

Typically, all your loin muscles and that, you know, you're using for quality steaks and other products.

We do have one customer that always insists on getting his jerky made out of ribeye, so we do that especially for him.

But for most of the time, it's going to be out of the round.

And in this case, we're going to do the eye of the round and the top round for this scenario.

So I'm going to start showing you how to trim up this eye of the round here.

This has already been deboned, and so now we're just going to trim up all the fat off of this product.

Then we're going to take that silver skin off it as well.

The fat and stuff that we trim off of it we can later use in other products.

We can use it in our burger for the case.

can we can use it for patties.

We have lots of uses for for the fat.

And so then once we get these trimmed up, we're just gonna put them on a tray and temper them and then get ready to slice them.

So that's how we're gonna do an eye of the round and then I'll have dad go ahead and walk you through this while I finish trimming this one up.

- All righty there's a cap on this top round that you take off of there.

Basically because there's a fat line in underneath this cap.

This is a cap of a top round.

You can use it for stir-fry, Swiss steak, any ground round, but this is the main muscle here.

This will be used a lot of times for Swiss steak, London broil.

You can see the lines, lines in this muscle.

They're all going this way.

So basically, we will cut this in half and slice it this way across the grain for tenderness.

- After you finished getting that trimmed up, you can show them, you do a London broil and then this would also you could cut as a top round steak for folks that want it.

Some other options the things we could do with it similar to what we do jerky is we could take either one of these and slice it thin for Philly cheese steaks.

We often do that for our retail case.

- Yeah, a lot of times we'll just take this off this is like the odd end you can use that for the stir-fry Swiss steak.

You cut across the grain here and you get your top round steak.

We do a few of them.

- Just do one London broil.

- Yeah, and there's a London broil that also comes out of it, but now you see the lines running this way and they get your jerky a little more tender not real chewy you just cut across that.

Here's the, it's what we'll make out of our Swiss steak.

You can do that, run that through the machine, makes a real tasty Swiss steak, nice and easy.

- And similar with this one, we put it, when we go back and slice it, you can see the grains are running this way, and so we want to cut across that.

If you happen to cut, if I was to cut this with the grain like that, when you try to make jerky, you'd be like just trying to rip it and it wouldn't come apart nice, so you'd have to cut across the grain.

And so if I wanted to do eye of the round steaks or also Swiss steaks, then I'm just going to make sure we're cutting across the grain like that.

Some other things we could do with this would be either round.

A lot of times we will make roast beef for our caterings and we'll slice, cook it, fully cook it and slice it, so, and put it with gravy.

So that's another item you can do with that.

So we're going to, if you want to grab a tray right next to you there.

We're going to go- - Yeah, one thing is with this kind of meat, there's no gristle involved to give you that really chewy taste in it.

- Okay, so we got these laid out here on the tray.

We're going to temper it.

We're going to put it in the freezer to drop the temperature of it.

That will help it to be a nice solid piece, and then we can go to the slicer, and when we slice it, then it will slice and make nice even pieces for us.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Thousands of years ago, the South American tribe of the Quechua in Peru introduced the boning, curing, smoking, and preserving of meat.

Buffalo was the main source of meat in those days, and buffalo jerky was the first type of jerky.

They call this recipe "Ch'arki," which translates "to burn meat."

- All right, so we just pulled the eye of the round and the top round, and we're going to be slicing out of the freezer.

I'm going to go ahead and check the temperature.

So this has been in the freezer for an hour and 15 minutes.

Now, ours is a commercial freezer and the air is moving quite frequently, but it's right around 30 degrees, 29.5 degrees is what the internal of that meat is.

So it's nice and firm.

We're ready to take it to the slicer now.

Actually, I'm going to take this one here.

And so we set our thickness on here.

Most of our equipment comes from Germany, so it's in metric so this is at six millimeters which is going to be pretty close to about a quarter of an inch is what you want to slice it.

Depending on what you like for your jerky, if you like a more chewy jerky, you'll want to slice a little bit thicker.

If you just want, you know, kind of, if you prefer a little bit thinner stuff and that'll be easier to dehydrate, then you can go thinner than that.

That's all up to you, but we have a nice setup here at six.

(meat slicer whirring) And so now we'll go ahead and start slicing it.

(meat slicer clanking) All right, and as you can see, even though that temperature was reading at 30 degrees, most of this meat is not frozen, just about the outside half inch is frozen.

So it gave us a nice even piece, but it wasn't too hard on our slicer to where we're going to break a blade or have issues with that.

So we'll do the top round next.

We're gonna lay it in like this, like we discussed, and cut it across that way.

I'm gonna move this out of the way.

(meat slicer whirring) (meat slicer clanking) (meat slicer whirring) All right.

So there we go, there's our top round.

You can see the meat's still thawed, but it's tempered around the outside which makes for nice slicing.

We kind of talked about the two different options of how you can what kind of meat you can choose from, and so, we like to do the eye of the round because that makes nice pieces by the time this gets dried down and that's a nice size for the consumer.

If you do big pieces like this I'll typically end up having to just hand hand rip it afterwards to get it down to portion sizes.

If you, the Jack Links and the bigger jerky makers, they actually will take this and stick it into like a shredder and that's what will cut them into a bunch of different squares and pieces like that.

All right, now we'll get this weighed out and we'll weigh out our spices and make our brine to put the jerky on.

(upbeat music) All right, we got our jerky sliced and now we're gonna make up our jerky marinade.

So the seasoning we use for this one is our hillbilly seasoning.

It consists of salt, sugar, it's got some black pepper, a little bit of crushed red pepper, it's got some cayenne pepper in it, so it's kind of like that sweet and spicy.

So this is a real popular one for us, this is our hillbilly jerky.

And then this is our fruit and spice extract that we're going to use.

This is going to help take care of the color as well as it gives us a little bit of shelf life there.

So we're going to add that into the water.

For this product, they prefer that we add it first.

That's the first ingredient we add to the pickle.

Now we're going to add our jerky seasoning.

(stirrer whirring) And some folks, they'll take their jerky and they'll put it in say a five gallon bucket or a crock, or a pan, whatever they decide.

For us, we're going to dump the water and the marinade back into the meat lug and then we're going to add the jerky to it just to make sure that each piece is getting down in that marinade good.

And then what we'll do is we'll leave the jerky in the marinade and we'll put it in the cooler for about 2 to 3 days and have it take up the flavor and the seasoning.

And then from there, after two or three days, we'll go to the tumbler and tumble it just to make sure that the seasoning has been evenly dispersed.

In a lot of commercial applications, they don't typically let the meat sit in the jerky because you're just in such a hurry to turn the product over.

And we've done that where we just go straight to the tumbler tumble for 30 minutes and then go right to the smoker.

My dad prefers to do it this way and I think as well it does take in more of the flavor.

Now, I'm just going to take these individual pieces and put them in there and make sure that each piece is getting coated nicely in that.

If I was to take a handful of these and put it in there and try to mix it up.

I've seen it where individual pieces will stick together and then they won't take up the seasoning in the marinade.

For this particular marinade, this is a pretty good seller for our jerky.

So the bags that we get are 15 pound for 15 pound batches.

A couple of different spice companies do actually make those available in five pound batches for folks that are hunters and they want to do some smaller deer jerky batches.

And so, when you're making jerky, ideally you're just putting enough water into it that the meat's going to soak it up.

And that's when that's typically when you know, that you've let it sit long enough is when that that meat's taking up all the liquid that's in the crock or in the meat lug.

One other thing I'll do, I'll point out, is that with a commercial tumbler, you can actually pull a vacuum on the meat.

And so what that's going to do, the vacuum that you draw on it is going to expand the particles of the meat and then whenever you're tumbling it, it's going to allow it to force deeper into the meat so that will give you a nice flavor throughout the meat.

We just still have that little bit of old school mentality that we prefer to let it sit before we tumble it.

You can see from there, I'm just trying to make sure each piece is coated nicely.

And here's part of that top round we're putting in.

I'll say the nice part about doing big slices like that is it's a lot easier to lay out.

All right, we've got it mixed up nicely.

Now I'm just pushing it down so everything's sitting in the liquid.

And we're going to cover this product and put it in the cooler to sit for about 1 to 2 days.

Then we'll bring it out and lay it out and get it cooked off.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] The Continental Army in the Revolutionary War era included salted meat and jerky as rations when fresh food was scarce.

It is also a common component of modern military rations such as the Meal, Ready-to-Eat or MRE.

- Okay, we've let this product sit for two days and we've pulled it out and this is what it looks like.

So you can see it's taken up a lot of the moisture and all of the marinade.

And now, we're going to take it to the tumbler and dump it in.

Okay, so there's a little bit of liquid left over, so putting it in a tumbler.

It's going to soak up the rest of that liquid and make sure it's evenly dispersed throughout the meat.

Another benefit of tumbling it is actually, when you're tumbling, it's this tumbler is similar to a cement mixer and it has two fins in it so it's taking the meat and it kind of scoops it up and drops it and then takes the meat scoops up and drops it.

So this is going to help with the tenderness process which is going to make for a softer jerky and a better end product.

So now we're going to take this, we're going to pull vacuum on it shove it in the cooler to tumble for 15 minutes and we're going to pull it back out and we're going to tray it up and get it ready for the smoker.

(meat tumbler whirring) So we're drawing a vacuum on this product and that'll pull all the air out of it and it'll start to expand the particles of the meat so that way as we tumble it then the seasoning will get dispersed throughout the meat and it'll penetrate the whole way through.

(upbeat music) All right, we're done tumbling.

Now we're going to get the jerky strips out of the tumbler and lay them down on this smoke rack.

- Smells good.

- So when we lay out these jerky strips, we want to make sure that there's nice air flow around each piece.

That will help it to dry and cook evenly.

- As you see, I'm a little faster than my son.

I'm still trying to teach him a little bit to speed up.

- Yeah, and if you're lucky enough to work with your dad, he'll always take the biggest pieces and lay them out and say that he covered more area than you did.

Leave the little ones for you.

- Well, I can say I didn't read the dummy.

(chuckles) He caught me.

He also spread them out a little bit more so he covers more ground.

(chuckles) - So there's an alternative to making whole muscle.

This is the whole muscle beef jerky.

Some folks will do a ground and formed jerky, where that would be what's considered like hamburger jerky.

And so what they would do is just grind it and then you either use a jerky gun or in our industry they call it a Colosimo press, and they would just shoot it out on strips and lay it out.

It takes away some of this labor that's associated with doing whole muscle jerky where you're having to lay pieces out.

But I don't think neither dad or I have ever really been a fan of that kind of jerky.

It's never been that great of a seller for us, so we just stick with a whole muscle jerky.

Now we'll take this jerky and we'll put it on our smoke truck.

(upbeat music) All right, so we just got the jerky in the smokehouse ready to go.

I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the cooking and the smoking process.

So for us, USDA changed regulations quite a few years ago where they're asking us, they're requesting that we are going to bring this product to fully cooked before we decide to dry it down.

That kind of, there was some illnesses from people that was using dehydrators where they were just, they were started out the cooking or they started out the dehydrating process and they weren't taking it to fully cook quick enough.

So the pathogens within the meat and within the jerky started to adapt to this environment.

And so, now they wanna make sure you're taking it to fully cooked and then you're gonna dry it.

So if you're at home, wanna do something like this, you might think about cooking it in the oven and then go ahead and using your dehydrator.

So this is gonna take about four hours and then we'll pull it out and show you guys our finished product.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Beef jerky's health benefits come primarily from its protein content, vitamins, and minerals.

Beef jerky contains a high concentration of nutrients, including proteins, minerals, and peptides, like carnosine.

- And now we're here at our jerky wall.

You can see aside from our hillbilly jerky, we got lots of different flavors.

A1 steak is a very popular one as well.

We not only do beef, but we also do pork jerky as well.

Hey, we're back with another episode of "Son of a Butcher."

I'm AJ O'Neil.

- A Son of a Butcher?

(group laughing) (upbeat music) And that's all folks.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided in part by the R.E.

Synergy Foundation, content for the sustainable world.

G&C Foods, quality at every turn.

Pittsburgh Spice and Seasoning Company, making life taste better.

The Allen Family, Robert, Ashley, Carol, and Fred.

And viewers like you.