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« Last post by Jim_MI on February 04, 2024, 07:49:31 PM »
Well, the veggie jerky experiment was pretty much a failure!
This was my first time making any kind of jerky, so I had no foundation upon which to build. I thought I would just do a small batch of beef jerky during the same smoke session. Based on one of the online recipes provided by David, I used Butler's Soy Curls as the meat substitute. An 8oz bag of these were rehydrate with a 20 min hot water soak. The rehydrated soy curls looked & felt like cooked chicken but had no taste. These were "wrung out" in a salad spinner and blotted semi-dry to determine a weight so that I could do an equilibrium brine (mistake #1, since unlike raw meat, the soy base had no salt in them to begin with).
I did a small batch of beef at the same time, but the combined mass of the beef plus soy was only 720 gm. So when I used one of the equilibrium spreadsheets found in the Jerky Forum here, things fell apart. The calculator started with 1 cup Worcestershire + 2 cups Soy Sauce, to which spices, Curing Salt #1, sugar & salt were added according to the spreadsheet. To this, I was supposed to add water to QS to bring the brine weight up to the "meat" weight. But before adding any additional water, the brine weighed more than the "meat" (mistake #2). So no water added, and the extra salt and sugar that the spreadsheet requested did not even dissolve. I split this brine between the beef & soy according to their relative weights. The beef and soy curls were then separately brined in zip-lock bags for 40 hrs.
After brining, the beef and soy strips were quickly rinsed, blotted dry, & racked for smoking.
Based on recommendations in the Jerky Forum here, I smoked at 140F for 2 hrs (1.5 oz Hickory), then started up the James Jerky Dryer. I didn't open the door until 4 hrs into the run (mistake #3). By then, the soy was WAY crunchy. Taste was pretty bad too. The brine was too salty, the sugar used to cut some of that saltiness never dissolved, and the low temp of the smoke left 2/3 of the hickory intact. The smoky taste was more akin to licking an ashtray - not sure if this was "oversmoking" or just low temp bad tasting volatiles flavoring the soy. FWIW, the beef turned out pretty bad too.
I'll try to attach before-n-after pics of the soy curls, but due to my inexperience with this forum, they may not be there when I hit Post - apologies in advance.
Bottom line is that I need to get comfortable with beef jerky before trying to do veggie jerky.
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