Step 1: cut up a shitload of the leanest beef into smaller bits. Just keep cutting it until you can't be arsed to keep going.

Step 2: do not give any to the cat no matter how nicely he asks

Step 3: Make some marinade or marinades.

I had 2kg of beef so I made four marinades. The basic marinade was soy sauce, worcestershire sauce and roughly cracked black pepper.

M1 was just the base, M2 had a dash of rice wine vinegar, M3 was the base + roughly cracked sichuan pepper, M4 was the base plus two finely sliced bhut jolokia scorpion peppers.

I put 0.5kg of M1 or M2, I wasn't paying attention, in after just 2 hours of marinade then let it cook for 4 hours. It was okay. Nothing special. Mainly tasted meaty. This is what was left of it 5 minutes after I took it out.

Here's marinade 1 or 2 depending on what the other one after 6 hours marinade and 4 hours drying out. Now, I also sprinkled this and all of the following meats with black pepper after spreading them on the trays, otherwise they left most of the pepper in the marinade trays. And I used a fuckload of black pepper doing this. I don't have a pepper grinder; just the pestle & mortar but I must have spent almost half an hour total just grinding black peppercorns for these four.

Delicious. Really tasty pepper jerky of a great texture.

This one was even better; either sichuan peppers have more salt in or they just taste of salt but in the past I've struggled to get home made food to have the tongue-numbing salt flavour that restaurant sichuan pepper has. With this it was perfect.

The final one was... uh. Maybe a bit too spicy. I was eating a lot of this and the previous one and they left me crying with the heat. Fucking great stuff but in terms of flavour alone I'd choose the sichuan pepper one, not this one which is just pure heat.


I couldn't cut the meat as thinly as I wanted to so I've chucked them back under the heat for a while. It's edible but not perfectly dehydrated after just 4 hours. A more attentive chef might take out the bits that are done and just let the ones that aren't stay in there, I don't care that much myself.

>>12184
I have wanted one of those for ages, but for dehydrating fruit rather than jerky - thanks for the pictures!

>>12186
That's a nice cat.

>>12184

Nicely done, lad!

Can you do some fruits please?

>>12196
The cat won't be interested but yes.

>>12196
I tried some cranberries by just chucking them in there but after 10+ hours I just had some hot cranberries; apparently you're supposed to "craze" them first which means boiling them for three minutes, presumably to break down the waxy skin. Anyway, no to that.
I cored and sliced three apples then rubbed them with sugar infused with vanilla extract and just bunged them in five minutes ago so that'll be done drying... some time tomorrow.

>>12198
It's the apples I'm particularly interested in - I really like dried apple.

>>12199
There's not much to say about them. There are three apples worth here, not very big ones so with four trays I can do 12 apples at a time but I'm just doing one tray now to see how it goes, I think this sugar might be too granular to be a pleasant chew. I wanted to use cinnamon rather than vanilla but couldn't find any.

>>12200
I realise this is a piece of string question depending on what you're drying, but how long does it typically take?

>>12201
There's a whole booklet that came with it full of tables of how long different things take. Jerky is 4-6 hours, various plants are 3-30 hours depending, probably averaging out around 10. Greens, mushrooms and celery are 3 hours minimum as the shortest, grapes and figs are the longest at 30.

>>12202
Once you've dried something, how long does it keep for?

>>12203
Fuck I don't know, ask me again in 50 years when I've had time to make enough to last.

They look like this now. Can't see many sugar crystals which is good. That's 16 hours at about 54 degrees C. They taste good but I think the vanilla detracts from the sour apple flavour, so I'll just do some plain or perhaps with lemon juice next.

hm the cat is trying to eat them. interesting.

New jerky batch. Filled the dehydrator this time but that meant it took 3-4 hours longer to do even the medium pieces; I started it earlier today but the larger pieces are still in there. All of them are sichuan, pepper and bhut jolokia. When they reach sufficiently dried status they are delicious.

>>12207
Good lord that looks amazing. How much hassle is it to clean the thing?

>>12208
You can just wipe it down; the trays come out and you can just stick them in the dish washer or scrub them yourself.

Hows it work? Does it bake the shit out of things working with a dehumidifier or vacuum or what?

I tried doing some strawberries (wrong time of year I know) and while they worked marvellously, waiting twelve hours for a handful of pieces of dried strawberry seems like a waste of time. I put some blueberries in too, after "crazing" or "checking" them in boiling water (the two instruction booklets use different words for the same thing) they just turned into a bit of a gloopy mess. Maybe 20+ hours would be effective but I'm not keen on leaving it running overnight.

Making another batch of jerky but this time the marinade is 50% korean soy sauce, 50% Maggi-Würze, whatever the fuck that stuff is. Could end up being too salty.

>>12210
I think there's a fan and a heating element in there. It's essentially just a very low temperature, well ventilated mini-oven.

I cut the meat while it was as frozen as my freezer gets and it doubled the surface area. This batch is almost too dry, despite it not being in for even 4 hours.
It's really good though.

This batch is just soy, Worcestershire sauce and a little toe-nail sized dollop of 6 mill scoville extract, 1 hour soak 4 hour heat.
It is the most delicious and hard to eat thing. My face is running after three small pieces.

Holy shit my arsehole is killing me. This is "knife moving in an open wound" level pain.

>>12245
Is this a direct reaction to eating too much homemade jerky?

>>12246
It's more a consequence of adding unnatural levels of capsaicin to the jerky.

>>12247

Bloody hell. Six million scoville units?! Maybe you should use a rubber dropper or a cocktail stick.

Any idea how much power these things use?

>>12273
The one pictured is rated at 600W, which is about 1/3rd of a regular kettle, if you're worried about it overloading your wiring. It won't be at that constantly, probably just at the start of the cycle, but let's assume it's a constant 600W just for starters: at ~12p/kWh that'd work out at ~70p per ten hours (rough maths), but I'd imagine it'd be about a tenth of that if it decreases the wattage as much as I'd expect it to. In other words, fuck all.

>>12275
Yeah the instruction booklet says the cost of running it starts at about 3p an hour or something.

Good timing, I just started another load today. A butcher just opened up in my local corner shop and they were happy to slice the meat for me, so I have 8 plate sized pieces of beef on the go, rather than the chips I shaved off frozen bits of whatever was cheapest at Sainsburies.

Similar marinade, more maggi wurze than soy sauce and no chillies, but I dry-fried the szechuan peppers before grinding them up, it's a lot more powdery.

>>12276
Have you tried using tamari instead of soy sauce? I have a feeling it'd work well with one of these; more umami.

>>12277

No. I'll have a look for it next time I'm at an Asian supermarket.

>>12202
I just got one to do my glut of figs. They've been going for 30 hours so far, and still have some way to go. Testing them from time to time - Mmm, warm, concentrated figgy goodness. Even if they don't dry out properly (I just quartered them), they're ridiculously nice.
Apples next, once the fig glut is cleared.

>>12740
Figs are pretty big, I hope you sliced them up first.

>>12741 (I just quartered them)

they came out great, very happy with the results. Will be drying out all sorts of things now.As a way of smoothing out peaks of stuff from the garden, it's got a lot going for it - saves ramming the freezer full of stuff that isn't improved by freezing. Still throwing out over 200kg of duff apples a week, it's been a really shitty year for that, with the mad weather.