Making Homemade Beef Jerky

I like beef jerky, being somewhat of a semi-health-conscious-nut who occasionally goes to the gym to push lumps of metal towards the sky.

What I don't like is the price: $100 a kilogram here in New Zealand. I also don't like the weird-ass junk additives that they chuck into it. And finally, I don't like that the stuff tends to be "wet" (aka not properly dried) so they have to seal it in cute plastic packaging - with whatever that has in it.

This jerky is homemade from prime New Zealand beef. Started with 1.5kg of very lean steak, sliced it thin, put it in the racks, sprinkled crystal salt on it (no marinade). Cost: about $30 for the meat and sweet-fuck-all for the salt - it was sitting in the cupboard. Time: about 1/2 an hour to cut and arrange, 6 hours to dry, rotated the racks after 3 hours.

Result: 650 grams of damn delicious, high-protein, properly-dried beef jerky.

Roughly 40g of protein and 200 calories per 100g - damn good snack, helluva lot better for you than the crap you buy in a store. Especially the so-called protein bars: that shit is fulla processed soy.

Just looking at that makes me hungry again.