Heya guys!
We’ve been on a mission to find some proper, tasty, beef jerky.
When I think of jerky I think of long strips of chewy, chewy beef, which tastes like beef, rather than just spices.
Strangely, as expensive as jerky is, the price doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get something great!
Quite a few packs I’ve seen have been more of a beefy dust than jerky. Not that I have a problem with beef dust…mmmm…beefy….it’s just not jerky.
This beef Jerky, made from Irish & British beef, is a whopping £5 per 100g butttt, it looked promising and for the sake of convenient beef consumption, it just had to be tested.
“Marinaded strips of lean British & Irish beef”, it sounds perfect.
Before my mouth does too much watering though, I better look at the ingredients. You can’t always quite tell if the ingredients inside are quite as nice as the presentation on the outside.
Well, the first ingredient is beef so that’s a relief.
The other ingredients though, not so much.
Sugar, Soya flavouring, maltodextrin, oil, MSG, spices, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, acidity regulator, antioxidant and preservative.
Usually sugar is the number 1 ingredient for a lot of the very very horrible cake/chocolate convenience foods I’ve tasted here in the past but on jerky, I did not expect sugar to be the second ingredient.
In fact, this jerky is almost 24% sugar, so about a quarter!
Apart from the beef and sugar the only things on the list that looks semi natural are the oil and spices, oil not exactly being fantastic for you anyway.
This looks a lot like a science experiment and not a list of things you want to put in your body.
I’m sure jerky has changed a lot since the days of getting a piece of meat and slapping a tonne of salt on it but still, it seems almost sad that all those chemicals are needed.
Still, lets open it up and have a look at what is inside, hopefully not beef dust, though the package isn’t see through so you never know.
Well….they are pieces of beef I guess.
Each piece is about the size of a postage stamp which is okay but a bit disappointing really, I’m not sure why leaving it as a strip would be so awful, I can’t quite imagine a cowboy getting a piece of this and holding it daintily between two fingers for lunch.
Presented with this, he would likely give you the two fingers.
Lets have a taste.
The beef flavor is good, you can taste it quite strongly and it’s very nice and natural tasting.
There are also flavours of spice there but not so many that they overpower.
So in the flavor department, despite the not-so-wholesome ingredients, it does work.
As for the texture, it is chewy as you would expect. Mmmm beef bubblegum.
It was a bit of a let down for me though as the pieces had those nasty bits of unchewable fatty not-niceness through them, which considering the packet says it uses the leanest meat, makes it all the more disappointing.
Beef isn’t the leanest meat by any stretch of the imagination to start with but it would have been nice to be free of any sinew-y bits.
All in all, the flavor is good with this jerky and as long as you’re under no illusions that it’s good for you, it’s a pretty nice snack.
Maybe I was unlucky with the inedible bits but I think I’ll still carry on my search for really really excellent jerky. Maybe a more natural one at that!
