hi everyone juania tebow here with buckskin revolution and it is august right now in
california so it's a great time to be making jerky because exactly what we need for that process
is what the environment is providing right really hot really dry really good conditions to dry meat
really quickly so might as well take advantage and use this time of year for making our jerky
if you've got meat to use so i was up until late last night cutting up a lot of the big muscles
of a deer to turn into jerky this video however is about what to do with the smaller cuts that
are a lot harder to get a nice slice on like some of the funky bits of meat that are over the ribs
or the smaller muscles from the lower four legs of the deer that have a lot of gristle and are really
hard to get a nice slice on going across the grain what to do with all of these leftover pieces is a
great topic if you have a meat grinder that's a really good way to go because you can actually
grind it and then spread that nicely ground meat onto a screen and then dry it that way
in a big sheet really great for making pemmican because then you can break it up
and get it into really small pieces but what are you going to do if you don't have a meat grinder
which is the case for me right now so i want to show you a cool technique if you have access to a
freezer so here is a funky strip of meat would be really hard to cut into nice thin pieces what i'm
going to do instead is roll it up and put it in a container that is cylindrical or tall and narrow
and what i'm essentially doing is i'm making a well-constructed meatsicle for the freezer so i'm
taking all of these small bits of muscle or pieces that are just odd shapes for cutting into jerky
and i'm packing them so that the grain is running with the length of the container
so going so the grain of the mussels is going this direction and
i'm packing all of these pieces in there so that they are going to form a nice unit together
so very conscientious about the direction of the grain as i am packing this and
then i'm going to put it in the freezer and i'm going to let it get not quite all the way
frozen because it's really hard to you know chop a totally frozen ice block packing this all together
into a nice solid wad a cylinder of meat with the grain all running the same way then i'm going to
freeze it and turn it into a partially frozen meatsicle then i can warm the outside run some
hot water around the outside pop it out of the container and then i can slice long pieces across
the grain of the whole unit together which would be so much harder for all of the small bits and
then i'm going to have a lot of nice thin pieces that i can lay out on a screen to turn into jerky
hi everyone well my meatsicle has set up it froze real nicely and then i had to defrost
it a little bit so we'll see if it is the properly frozen amount but it is time to go ahead and make
jerky out of my nicely constructed cylindrical meatsicle so check out how i made a solid hunk
of deer meat out of a bunch of little muscles and now it is in a great state to be slicing
really nice and thin like i want for jerky so i'm just gonna slice through this as thin as i can
treating the whole thing as a unit it's of course going to fall apart i'm not it's not
actually attached so i'll have to lay these out as separate pieces but you can see how i got a nice
thin slice there way thinner than i could have gotten had it been just mushy thawed meat
a good sharp knife and i'm in business this is a nice carbon steel knife
freshly sharpened i want to say it cuts through it like butter but it's like frozen butter right
that's the whole idea because butter is hard to get really good slices off of
some of the edges were a little thawed so i'm going to re-freeze those i know you're not
supposed to re-freeze meat but when you're making jerky out of it it isn't a problem the reason
you're not supposed to thaw and then re-freeze meat is because that process breaks down the cell
walls but when you're making jerky that's actually good because it helps it dry faster so i've got
all of this lovely jerky cut and now it's time to get it drying great way to make usable jerky
out of those tiny little bits and pieces that otherwise would be super hard and obnoxious to cut
you