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Biltong Thread!

The Munt

Observe everything. Listen intently.
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Seen plenty of jerky threads in here so thought i'd share my latest Biltong project with you lot!

Started with a rough design...


Then jumped straight in...


Used a wood grain coated Melamine for the box, cut a hole for a computer fan...


Got some fancy hinges that couldn't hold the top up (too heavy), note the pneumatic struts in the later photos..


Some nice thick dowel racks for hanging...



Took about 4 hours to build the box with a buddy who's cabinet making skills far outweigh my own!

Managed to wall mount it solo, using a chair on top of a chest freezer and 2 tent poles! Added some LEDs for aesthetics..



Now for the first batch that went in this morning, i used 4.5kg of fresh Silverside sliced decently thick as i like my biltong sliced once dried and quite wet.

I placed the sliced meat into a large pot and poured 1 cup of apple cider vinegar over the meat along with 500g of Safari biltong spice mix (you can do youself by mixing dried Coriander seeds, salt, pepper and brown sugar), i just had some so used it.

Mix the meat, vinegar and spice incredibly well by hand, cover and fridge overnight. Ensure you cover all the meat with vinegar as this (cooks the meat)kills bacteria, and ensures none can grow on the outside layers as the moisture has left the protein. But biltong is dried in room temperature environments so this step is important, you dont want rotten meat!

The meat was hung this morning ! Ill post results when its ready.. will probably be at least a week cos its thick!




Just so you know this box is crazy overkill, but i love my biltong, if you are interested in trying it, you can do it with a cardboard box, wire, light bulb, fan, alfoil to catch drips and inverted plastic coated paperclips for meat hooks!





Biltong is made in fluctuating temps and humidity up to 100f.. the vinegar stops the meat souring so although its hard to accept you can hang your meat for weeks without refrigeration. Once dried there is practically no storage requirements, throw it in your backpack or pocket for the road! High source of protein! And damn delicious...



Hope to introduce some of you to a great past time with this post! Any questions ask away!

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
 
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It looks really good but I dont know if i could get over the idea of just air drying. I imagine it would just taste like jerky from a dehydrator?
 

Thebutcher

testing testing.....is this thing on?
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I have never made bitong but I had a customer request that we cut some from a beef we were processing for them
(I had to look it up to find out what cut it came from traditionally) it was a biltong blog in South Africa they called it "Silver back" had to look THAT up to turns out it's the rib eye or blackstrap if it's wild game
So to make it easy for them to process it need to be cut the same thickness so we layed the beef out in our freezer and cut it on our saw frozen with the fence at 1/2 inch and they came out perfect.
But I haven't seen it processed befor vary cool.
 
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