How to Make Beef Jerky in Your Smoker

When you learn how to make beef jerky in your smoker you can bypass all the beef jerky recipes that call for liquid smoke. Smoker beef jerky is about as authentic as jerky gets.

Making jerky outdoors on a smoker is closer to the old pioneer method. That's when beef was cured and dried to retain for eating on the long trails.

Wood Smokers

By using this method not only do you get some great eating but also it's just doggone fun!

How to Make Beef Jerky in Your Smoker

Selecting Beef For Smoker Jerky

Selecting the beef you use for jerky is the same regardless of the method you use to generate the jerky.

You must settle on a lean cut of beef and then trim any fat you see. Fat will not dry out and it will cause your jerky to go rancid quickly.

Most cuts from the round section of the beef animal do just fine. My personal choice is eye of round. It's a particular muscle cut with no connective tissue and has very limited internal fat and any external fat is in fact trimmed.

You can buy round steak for easy slicing into strips but I regularly buy an eye of round roast and have my butcher slice it 1/2 inch thick. Then I trim the fat and cut the slices into strips.

For this method you will need two pounds of beef.

Smoked Beef Jerky Marinade

Caution: This smoked beef jerky method calls for a lot of black pepper. If you're not a black pepper fan you might want to cut back a bit for your first try.

1 cup soy sauce
4 tablespoons ground black pepper
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 dash hot pepper sauce
1 dash Worcestershire sauce

Directions

Combine the soy sauce, ground black pepper, cider vinegar, pepper sauce and Worcestershire sauce in a non-reactive bowl. Mix the ingredients well and add the beef strips.

Pour the strips and marinade in a resealable plastic bag. Place the bag in the refrigerator overnight. Turn the bag over once in a while when you think about it.

Smoking Beef Jerky

Fill the fire pan of your smoker with charcoal and light it. Wrap some wood chunks of your choice in heavy-duty foil and punch a few holes in the foil.

Remove your marinated beef strips from the refrigerator and dry them as well as you can with paper towels. The dryer the better!

When your charcoal is ready for smoking add the foil wrapped wood chunks to the coals.

Try to say a 140-degree temperature in your smoker with the use of the vents. You only want the meat to smoke and not cook.

Lay the marinated meat strips out on the grill so that they do not overlap. Alternatively you can drape the strips over the rods of the grill grate. You can smoke a lot of jerky this way.

Kick back and relax as you smoke the jerky over low heat. Pop a top or two!

Your smoked beef jerky will be done when the edges appear dry with just a limited hint of moisture in the town of the slices, about 6 to 8 hours.

For a lighter smoke flavor you might consider removing the meat from the smoker after two hours and quit drying in the oven.

This is one of my beloved beef jerky recipes. So now you have it. How to make beef jerky in your smoker!

How to Make Beef Jerky in Your Smoker

Smokers For Outdoor Cooking - Picking the Best Smoker

The smoker is used to add flavor to meats and other foods by exposing them to the smoke from burning or smoldering materials, mostly wood. Though meats are most generally smoked, other foods like cheese and vegetables, may be smoked as well. Smoking may or may not be a key part of the barbecue process, but some citizen swear that the grilling feel is incomplete without smoking.

Meat smokers for outdoor cooking or grilling come in so many varieties that it is quite daunting for most beginners to determine on the right one. Charcoal is a beloved fuel for these smokers. Traditional American barbecue is generally cooked on one or the either of these charcoal smokers: offset charcoal smokers or Upright Drum Smokers.

Wood Smokers

The chief distinguishing highlight of the offset charcoal smoker is that the cooking room is usually cylindrical in shape, with other smaller cylinder attached to one end for the firebox. To smoke the food, a small fire is lit in the firebox. The smoke and the heat are drawn into the compartment where the food is kept through a connecting pipe. The heat and the smoke pass through the food, tenderizing it, before passing out through an exhaust vent. In cooking the food, the smoke also provides a unique flavor to it.

Smokers For Outdoor Cooking - Picking the Best Smoker

The other kind of smoker, the Upright Drum Smoker, as the name suggests, has an upright steel drum that is used for cooking. The contraption can be arranged in a collection of ways, but generally a basket retention charcoal is held at the lowest of the drum to contribute the smoke and the heat. Some charcoal smokers use a bowl of water in the smoker to keep the meat moist.

The propane smoker is also being increasingly used to smoke meats. As the term indicates, the heat in this smoker is generated by a gas burner. The gas flames, in turn, heat a steel or iron box that contains the wood or charcoal that provides the smoke. The technology heats the wood, but provides it with only sufficient oxygen to smoke, rather than to burn. The smoke passes through the vents smoking the foods placed in the containers.

Electric smokers are the beloved option for citizen who need a shorter start up time for smoking. Those galvanic smokers that come in upright models contribute a relatively larger large interior cooking space.

The most Traditional formula of smoking meats is the smoke box method. This essentially uses a fire box and a food box. The terms are self-explanatory in themselves, and the fire box produces the heat and the smoke to cook the food stuff in the food box.

Finally, there is also a collection of cold smokers that do not use heat to cook food at all. These are favorable for items such as smoked bacon, thick smoked cheese, cold salmon and trout. The only disadvantage of using this kind of smoker is that it takes a much longer time than the hot smoker.

Bogged down by the options? think your own tastes and conveniences when you shop for your smoker, and you won't go wrong!

Smokers For Outdoor Cooking - Picking the Best Smoker