Let's Eat Jerky!

Remember how I said I was going to dehydrate quinoa first?  Well, plans have changed.  I realized that quinoa is teeny tiny and would slip through the slats in the drying trays so I had to order sheets to place in the trays to prevent that from happening.  So while I wait for those to come in, I decided to dry other stuff on my list instead.  I could not find cranberries or apricots so I opted to do cherries, apples, and papaya.  For the meat, I went ahead and did salmon jerky as well as beef jerky.  I also did green beans and sweet potatoes. 

Prepping

Fruit

I pre-treated the fruit so it would maintain it's color- especially the apples.  Pre-treatment merely involves soaking the sliced up fruit pieces in a water and lemon juice solution for a few minutes.  When I started on the cherries, I realized I did not have a cherry pitter so I had to manually remove the seeds, making my cherries look a little mangled- but they are still delicious!  The apples came out great but I'm a sucker for dried apples.  Just ask my mom :-)  The papaya was surprisingly tasty but Dennis didn't like it.  He said they tasted like cardboard.  He prefers the store-bought dried papaya that you get in a Hawaiian seed shop that still has quite a bit of moisture in it.  The cherries will be good in my quinoa hot cereal which I am mightily looking forward to.  Fruit drying was very successful and I definitely will do more apples for backpacking and want to try some berries next time as well.



Fresh papaya, apples, cherries, sweet potatoes and green beans

After dehydrating

Vegetables

I blanched the green beans before drying to break down the tough exterior and, in retrospect, I should have done it with the sweet potatoes as well.  Next time I will because the sweet potatoes didn't turn out exactly how I wanted them.  They are chip-like but still retain a raw, almost grainy, flavor which is not what I wanted.  I will also add salt and maybe some paprika to them next time for additional flavor.  The green beans turned out great.  They look like shriveled little unappetizing pieces of crap but they are very tasty and I can see that they would be very good in a one pot meal.

After dehydrating

Jerky

I soaked both the salmon and the beef in my super special teriyaki marinade overnight.  I've been using this recipe for years on every kind of meat you can imagine but it's actually specified as a Korean Beef marinade.  I can't remember where I got it- online somewhere.   So I'm sorry but I can't give credit where credit is due.  I tripled the recipe for the amount of meat I had.

For each pound of meat, I make the following marinade:
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup chicken stock
2 TBSP brown sugar splenda
2 TBSP sesame oil
1 TSP black pepper
1 TSP ground garlic
1 TSP ground ginger
2 green onions (chopped)
1 TBSP sesame seeds

I sliced the salmon and beef into strips, soaked them overnight, and laid them on the trays for dehydrating.  The beef is grass-fed so it's super lean (and frickin' expensive).  Every few hours I patted the meat with paper towels to soak up the excess oils.  I left the meat in the dehydrator for 10 hours and it probably could have been shorter but I wanted to make sure.  It turned out SO SO GOOD!  The salmon is unbelievable! 

Fresh salmon and grass-fed beef

Soaking in the marinade

Ready to dry!
 

Finished product

Temperatures and dehydrating times vary depending on size of item, humidity, fat content, etc so it's different every time.  You just have to check the food periodically to see how it's going.  If one tray is done, you can remove that tray and continue drying the other trays.  For example, I took the papaya tray out well in advance of the cherries so that they wouldn't over-dry.  The cherries took 14 hours-just for some perspective.

Next up- Quinoa (as soon as the trays come in!)

Next hike- Mt. Woodson