Jerky and Smoked Cheese

Now that it is January, we can finally post about a few things we were making in December for gift giving. Had to keep it a secret until after the holidays...

We enjoy making jerky and folks seem to really like it. We used around 20 pounds of beef top round this time and made four batches. We made regular and teriyaki flavor and smoked the batches with hickory or mesquite. Our favorite brine to use is Scott's which is a basic brine and we add our own spices and flavors to personalize our jerky.

First we trim away any fat from the meat and cut it into thick, even pieces.

After it has been in the brine for at least six hours, we drain it, slip it onto bamboo skewers, air dry it for an hour and then smoke it until it is the right level of dryness. This can take a day or two depending on outside temperatures and humidity. A couple of pans of wood chips is all it needs to develop a strong, tasty smoked flavor.

We use several different smokers that we have collected. We like the Little Chief smokers by Luhr Jensen. With the top load model, we can smoke cheese.

We take each two pound brick of cheese and cut it into four blocks and place them on a rack.

The rack that normally slides down into the smoker is slipped over the top of the smoker with the lid off and kept high in the air. The cheese has to be up at the top. Then we slip a cardboard box down over the extended rack. Having the cheese up high keeps it from melting. We used two pans of wood chips for each batch.

Then we sealed up the cooled cheese and labeled it for gift giving. We made mesquite smoked pepper jack, hickory smoked cheddar, alder smoked jack and apple smoked colby jack. We smoked a total of sixteen pounds of cheese.

We had a lot of fun making it all and we got good reviews from everyone we shared it with.