 Meat Boy is back! Today, we are making jerky, arguably the most popular preserved food. And all you're going to need is a solid cut of muscle meat as well as an oven, in addition to whatever spices or flavorings you'd like to add. It's very difficult to have a preserved source of protein. Or as with fat, with carbohydrates, you have various things like beef tallow, nuts, rice, beans. It's very easy to get in your fat and carbohydrate requirement if you were to survive long periods of time without access to fresh food. But for protein, you don't really have that many options as the only animal sources of protein that are non-perishable have to be processed and dried yourself. And those processes tend to be fairly involved and long, but for the most part my goal is to show you guys something easy and achievable with minimal requirements. So let's get started. So here I have some ribeye that's been sitting in my fridge a little too long and instead of letting it go to waste, we're going to slice it up and make it into jerky. It's worth noting that normally you would remove the fat from the jerky as that tends to go rancid if it's stored for long periods of time. I personally don't mind eating the fermented fat, I actually enjoy the flavor. So whether or not you trim the fat is up to you, I'm just saying in most traditional jerky recipes for the longevity of the product, you do want to trim the fat off. So all you have to do is cut this into about 1 eighth of an inch thick strips. You don't want them to be too thin, otherwise it's going to be very hard and brittle and crumble apart. And if the slices are too thick, they're just not going to dry out on the inside and the inside is going to ferment. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but in regards to traditional food safety and traditional jerky making, it is a bad thing. So now we have the sliced up beef. Of course you could just salt this and put it in the oven and you'd have some relatively plain jerky. I mean you could even do it without salt, then you'd have something really bland. Just about every single jerky recipe however, does season it. Today I'm going to use a pretty carnivore style seasoning. So here we have some fish sauce, which is basically fermented rotten anchovies. It's one of my favorite flavorings from meat, you know, replicates that fermented umami flavor. Here I have some raw honey and since we're eating this, it doesn't really matter if the honey is raw. But adding a little bit of sweetness to this definitely adds to the complexity and also calorie amount. You know, from a survival perspective, you know, honey is very calorie dense and of course I'm going to season it with some salt. You could add black pepper, something else that would be great would be like coconut aminos, definitely some vinegar, and we'd probably want to throw some vinegar in here just to add bite to it, add acidity to contrast the sweetness. So just a little bit of apple cider vinegar will go a long way. Now you want this to marinate for at least a few hours, ideally overnight. I mean you could even go two or three days if you want to. I think the flavor is just going to get deeper and more complex. So the meat has marinated for about six hours. But again, you can go 12 hours overnight, two, three days, whatever you'd like to, and you can get really creative with the spices. Use whatever herbs or seasonings or sauces that you'd like to. I prefer organic, higher quality, animal based stuff, you know, as close to nature as possible. And I'm going to lay these strips out onto an oven rack that's on top of a sheet pan. If you don't have an oven rack, you can just put the jerky on a sheet pan. You might have to flip it over a few times throughout the cooking process. And even with the rack, you might want to do that. But this just makes it a little easier and less labor intensive. For those of you guys that have a dehydrator, I mean, you probably don't need to be watching this video because you already know how to make jerky. But I'm assuming you guys don't have a dehydrator. If you do, the luxury of that is you can make raw jerky. So you can dehydrate the jerky at a temperature that's like below 100 degrees. Granted, it'll take a day or two to dehydrate as opposed to a couple hours. That's a way to preserve more of the nutrition and make a very unique food that no one else is really doing. And all this stuff will shrink substantially, so don't worry about putting it too close together. So you want the oven on the lowest temperature possible. For me, that's 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes it'll be 200 degrees Fahrenheit, but usually it's 170. If you want to get really crazy and try to do a lower temperature jerky, I mean, you could even keep the oven door open and take the temperature and put it on the lower rack, but we're keeping this simple and we're just going to put the jerky in and check on it every hour. It should be somewhere between four and five hours to completely dry out. You don't want to dry it out too much and you don't want to dry it out too little. If you dry it out too much, it's going to be really hard, brittle. You lose some of the water weight of the protein. Therefore, from a product standpoint, if you were trying to sell it, why would you want to overdehydrate the jerky when you can still have some water in it and it still remain non-perishable? So it's been about four and a half hours now. Oh, it's actually still a little wet on one side. So maybe because this oven's convection isn't working that well, we've got to flip these over and dry them out a little more. I should have either used the bottom oven or turned the convection on. A big part of this drying process is the air flow. So if your oven's fan isn't working, it's going to take longer, which is what we have here. So we've had the convection on for about an hour and things are looking good. So if the fan in your oven is actually working, this would take only three to four hours. It did take us a bit longer and the way you can tell this is done is firstly by the color, it's supposed to be a very, very deep dark brown. So when you break apart the jerky, you see the fibers, you're going to see the fibers and then it's going to be dry in the middle, relatively dry in the middle. So here's a piece with a bit of the fat on it, actually really good. Fish sauce plus honey, plus apple cider vinegar, oh my god. It's like, you have a slight sweetness, huge depth of flavor from the honey, from the fish sauce, from the apple cider vinegar. So I could eat this whole tray. I think the honey makes a huge difference here. So if you're going to skip out on an ingredient, make sure it's not the honey. But thank you guys for joining me today. I hope this helps some of you out in preparing yourselves for whatever the future entails in regards to preserved foods. Last week we did the canned beef. The week before, I believe we did a confit method. So if you guys want to check the last few weeks of cooking videos, those are all based around preserving meat, preserving high quality animal foods. I think next week I'm going to show you guys how to make pemmican. And if you guys have any other ideas or would like to see me do something, definitely let me know down in the comments below. Today we're actually going to do our second live stream on the new YouTube channel, Frank 2 Fano. So definitely go down in the description and check that out. It's going to be around 2 PM Eastern time. I'd like to do a workout live stream, but YouTube Mobile wasn't letting me stream until I had 1,000 subscribers. And even though I did, it doesn't seem to have registered in their system yet. So we're going to try to do a workout live stream tomorrow. Worst case scenario, we'll do some vegan critiques instead. So of course, if you guys could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon, and above all, please share the video. And if you guys didn't see my video yesterday, definitely check it out. So you can also go to Frankie's Free Range Meat for high quality animal foods, Frankie's Naturals for Minimal Ingredients, Minimally Processed, Hygiene and Cosmetic Products, and Frank-Fano.com if you'd like a free carnivore diet meal plan. Thanks again for joining me, guys. Enjoy the rest of your day.