Jerky – oh that sweet chewy bounty of the heavens!
Real jerky is awesome! Dehydrated meat, usually beef, cut into strips and flavoured to perfection. Unfortunately most people have not tried proper jerky. All they have tried is that awful rubbery crap you get in little packets at servo’s and bottle shops.
Well that jerky is the same to real jerky as powdered mashed potatoes is to real potatoes – a horrible aberration, a pale shade of what the good stuff really is.
When living in Melbourne there was a deli at the Vic Markets that did really good beef jerky and whenever I traveled to the big city I would buy up as much as possible. But now living in NSW, Melbourne is a long way away, especially during the pandemic.
So I’ve been learning to make my own – and I’ve gotten damn good at it! And because, like Rarity, I am the paragon of generosity I’m going to share that recipe with you now.
Ingredients
1.5kg slab of Beef
1/3 cup of Soy Sauce
1/3 cup of Worcestershire Sauce
1 tbsp of Minced Garlic
1 tbsp of Brown Sugar
1 tsp of Chilli Flakes
1 tsp of Smoked Paprika
½ tsp of Ground Black Pepper
Method
Trim all the fat from the beef, stick in the freezer for two hours
Easier to carve when slightly frozen
Remove beef from freezer, slice into strips 0.5cm thick
If too thick meat wont dehydrate inside properly
In a bowl mix the Soy Sauce, Worcestershire Sauce , Garlic, Brown Sugar, Chilli Flakes, Smoked Paprika and Black Pepper.
Ohhh that delicious smell!
Massage meat strips thoroughly through the mix. Cover with cling wrap and marinate overnight
Meat should have absorbed the mixture
Take marinated beef strips, put in food dehydrator set on high for 9 hours. If you don’t own a food dehydrator either go buy one (they are worth it!) or else stick in the oven on low for 6 hours.
Space evenlyRotate racks if meat is not drying evenly
And now you have jerky! EAT!
So damn good!
And that’s it – simple as! Follow Big Angry Trev’s Jerky Recipe and you will get brilliant meat every time!
As I mentioned when reviewing theE-I-E-I-O burger, I love a meal where there is more than one meat contained within the dish. And on a recent visit to Katoomba NSW I discovered a restaurant-slash-bar that had on its menu a dish that contained not two meats or three but indeed four!
So lets have a gander at the Bootleggers Meat Share Plate.
A meal made in Trev-heaven!
So the description of the meal is a Share Plate and it is indeed intended for two people. Given it was our anniversary I relented and shared this plate with my wife, but being the kind woman she is she let me devour the lions portion of it.
The meal comes with four meats from two different animals. Beef brisket and links (sausages) and chicken wings as well as fried chicken. Personally I would have preferred the links be made out of pork but you can’t have everything.
Along with the above came enough non-meat foods to ensure that you would have some chance of being able to pass your next bowel movement. Slaw, Corn, Pickles, Potato Salad and Chips. Good to see that at least 40% of the sides were spud based – potatoes being that good that they should almost be considered an honorary meat!
Unto the breach!
The meats were all very tender. The fried chicken was done very well, not remotely oily or greasy like that one would get from a fast food restaurant. The chicken wings were lightly spiced so not as hot as buffalo wings but at least had a bit of bite to them. The brisket was very tender as brisket should be. The only meat that didn’t impress me was the links. They weren’t bad in any way, but just your average beef sausages so were somewhat overshadowed by the rest.
The non-meat stuff was good too. I think. I dunno, I wasn’t really paying attention.
Exploding Hot Sauce!
Sauce made by chef Wile. E. Coyote
The waitress brought out two types of hot sauce, espousing their virtues about how they were made on site, not simply store bought. As readers of my blog would know I love hot sauces so was eager to try them out. The red hot sauce was indeed very hot, not as hot as the likes of Mad Dog 357, but still had a helluva kick. The green sauce? Well I went to open it…
…and it exploded!
Perhaps exploded is not the right term. The heat had built up in the bottle so as soon as the top was twisted it made a sound like shook up cola can and the sauce blew forth! It covered my shirt, splattered my face and even left a sorta Trev-shaped splatter pattern on the window behind me.
The poor young waitress was very apologetic. After ascertaining that it had not gone in my eyes she brought multiple wet paper towels for me to clean myself, then later appeared with a shirt from the restaurants merchandise stash for me to wear home. So sadly, unless I had chosen to lick my clothing I never got to sample what the green hot sauce tasted like.
The shirt I wear when doing my radio show, though my music isn’t bootlegged – the CD’s are just really worn
Overall
This meal is nearly $80 but its certainly enough for two people (as long as one isn’t me) and its very good tasting. Besides the volatile hot sauces the only other accompaniment was a small bowl of BBQ sauce – personally I would have preferred to get a hearty gravy but perhaps that would push the meal into the realms of making a coronary a certainty. The bar had a different selection of wheat beers on tap which were quite nice, but if you’d take my recommendation skip the ginger based beer, it was pretty average. So yeah, do yourself a favour and if in Katoomba drop past Bootleggers – you will get a decent feed and maybe a free shirt!
I am a total fan of combining meats. Despite my rather disastrous ’14 meats stew’ I tried to make a decade ago, I persevere with trying different combos to see what fleshes of what animals will complement each other on the palette.
Given this carnivorous mindset, I was therefore very happy in my wanderings to come across the E-I-E-I-O Burger.
The meats that dreams are made of…
That’s right – deep-fried chicken, double beef patties, double bacon and triple cheese! These people don’t muck about! Old McDonald’s farm must be looking pretty sparse after they made a few of these babies! The ingredients were all done to perfection: the deep-fried chicken was not oily like it had just come out of a KFC or something, the patties were big and juicy and definitely home made in the good way, the bacon was plentiful, the onions was grilled excellently, the lettuce was thankfully negligible and the tomato was, due to special request, non-existent.
I was very pleased that they remembered to leave the tomato off as so many places either refuse, or otherwise forget, to make any alterations one asks for (I’m looking at you BAB Burger makers). I’m not sure what the special sauce was except that it certainly shat all over whatever it is they use for a Big Mac. It had a slightly smoky flavour with just the right amount of bite and it was that plentiful that I found myself having to use a napkin on both my hands and mouth after each bite. Some may see that as a negative – I see it as a sign of a chef who isn’t stingy!
You magnificent Frankenstien’s Monster of a burger you!
What can I say – to quote Mr Jackson This was a damn tasty burger! I mean it was REALLY friggin good! Unfortunately I didn’t have time to savor it properly as we were running late for Transformers 5 so had to gobble it. Given its size (much bigger than it appears in the above photo) this still took me 5 minutes of solid mastication. At $18 and considering it does not come with any sides whatsoever its not the cheapest burger but it’s that good I would happily lay out the cash again. If you find yourself in Greensborough Plaza in Melbourne then stop by Flame 400 near the cinema and gorge your tastebuds on a burger that has cow, chookand pig all under the same bun – you deserve it!
Eaten this burger before or have another one you think worthy of mention? Would love to hear about it in the comments section below!
For years I have believed, quite rightly, that Octopus were truly the most evil of all animals (for details on why I believed this the case please see my blog post HERE). However I have to be man enough to admit when I am wrong, when I have made a mistake. Because I have discovered an animal that is even MORE evil that Octopus, a creature that causes such pain and misery that it’s eradication is well overdue.
This evil creature is the Australian Paralysis Tick.
Who knew the ultimate evil would be so small? I always thought it would look like my ex-wife – though there is a certain resemblance with the hairy legs and bulbous arse
What this tick does is truly abominable, truly evil,truly horrendous. This little bastard will bite some animal like a bandicoot or something and take something called alpha-gel from the animal away with it. Then when this gelled-up tick see’s you it leapfrogs on like the mini-assassin it is. It crawls inside your clothing and bites you to suck your blood, little vampire fragger, and deposits some of the gel. Now this can cause things like rashes or even an anaphylactic reaction. But there is something it’s bite does that goes waaaay beyond that.
It’s bite… wait for this… it’s bite can make you ALLERGIC TO RED MEAT!
Let me say it again so the full horror of this can sink in…
IT’S. BITE. CAN. MAKE. YOU. ALLERGIC. TO. RED. MEAT!
Have you ever heard of anything so frighteningly horrible in all your days?! You can’t eat red meat anymore! You can never in your life have a steak again – ever! No pork, beef or lamb for you for the rest of your now miserable days!
I don’t believe in suicide personally, but f*ck me! If ever something was going to make me put a bullet through my own brainpan it would be that!
There are three true joys of life: Family, Transformers and Meat. Those are the top three without question, undebatable. Beer & Hobby Farming come a close 4th and 5th but those are the three that truly make life special, bring joy to your soul, let you know that the world is a wondrous place (yeah sex is good too and probably up there when you are young, but when you have a family it’s just a nice treat for those ultra-rare times when the kids are asleep and you are both not exhausted).
Anyway, imagine yourself sitting outside on a sunny spring day, having lunch with your family on your little farm, watching the bee’s and butterflies flying from tree to tree pollinating your fruit crop. Birdsong in the air. Your son is playing with his Stunticons at the table while you have your latest Protectobot sitting inside awaiting your attention. You have a beer in one hand and sitting in front of you is…. a salad.
…. where the f*ck is the f*cking meat?! No good tick there because some bad tick decided to f*cking bite you!
Now I don’t mind veggies, hell I grow a lot of’em. But they are the secondary food source, they are there to add a little colour to your meal which by all rights should have a steak so big it’s overlapping the edges of the plate. To take that away from someone, to deny someone that true pleasure for the rest of their lives….. I’m getting all teary just thinking about those poor souls it has happened to. Yes you can technically still eat chicken and fish – but for every damn meal? Forever?! And fish is a honorary meat at best, ranked alongside cheese and potatoes.
So that’s what this bastard of a creature does – truly the total prick of the animal world! Apparently this tick lives on the east coast of Australia, spread out from Lakes Entrance in Victoria up to Cooktown in far north Queensland. Or as I refer to it “The area of Australia I will now never, ever visit again!”
Where is the government on this? It’s been recently announced that the AIDS epidemic in Australia is now officially over, the sector that has monitored it said that the statistics of AIDS in Australia are now so low that they are not really quantifiable. So if an awful disease that stopped people enjoying sex is at an end, how about we channel all that funding into combating this latest horrific threat that stops people enjoying red meat!
They might be a thousand miles from here but not taking any damn chances!
Where are the guys is Hazmat Suits, with giant magnifying glasses and flamethrowers stalking through every tick ravaged area, destroying these filthy little mongrels? Why has the entire eastern coast of Australia not been evacuated so that giant airships full of tick-killing spray can strafe the areas for weeks, killing each and every single one! Hell, maybe we could get giant earth digging equipment and cut off the entire eastern edge of Australia and shove it out to sea where we could safely bomb it into oblivion.
Seems a bit extreme I know, but I’d rather let loose a bunch of nukes than never eat a porterhouse again. I can take living on the continent that has the most poisonous spiders and snakes, has the biggest crocs and sharks, but there is only so much a man can stand.
F*ck you Australian Paralysis Tick, you dirty f*cking evil little prick tick bastard you!
As a rule if a dish has a manly name like ‘Tradie’, ‘Truckie’ or ‘Bomb’ then it’s going to be something yours truly is going to want to shove in his gob! Why? Well besides desperately trying to hide ones insecurities from the world by appearing macho and gruff on the outside, hiding the wobbly, gelatin-like persona within, it usually means there is going to be lots of MEAT!
On a recent state-crossing trip I had occasion to drop in to three different cafe’s which had foodstuffs like those described above on their menu. So lets examine them and see if they were worth this weary traveller’s mastication.
The TRADIE Burger
Location:Gray St Café, Swan Hill, VIC
Despite the blokey name this came across as a pretty standard, average burger. Cheese, lettuce, egg, bacon, tomato, sauce – the patty was sausage mince with carrot throughout which was kinda different. No onion which was a shame. It was nice that they will change the fillings based on your predilections (I went with two friends; one didn’t want bacon, another didn’t want egg, I didn’t want tomato) but it all came across as something that you could buy most anywhere. If these burgers were boobs they would be B-cups – certainly enough there to sate your appetite, but leaving you wishing there had been more to them. Not really recommended.
The TRUCKIE Burger
Location:Balfours Cafe, Birkenhead, SA
Now we are talking more of a burger! The usual lettuce, tomato, sauce, onion, egg etc but then double meat, double cheese and double bacon! And by Primus the amount of bacon – they easily could have referred to it as quadruple bacon! The amount of oil dripping off this burger was a bit disturbing, the wrapper felt like I could use it to grease myself up and then toboggan on my gut down the nearest freeway. But you know what, after eating what felt like half a pigs worth of crispy goodness I was feeling sexy enough to try! Happily recommended.
The MALLEE BOMB!
Location:Cobb & Co Café, Murrayville, VIC/SA border
I ordered this thinking it was a lamb burger, but when it arrived it turned out to be some sort of weird dissected souvlaki. Chips covered with Mallee Lamb, with cheese, fried onion and garlic sauce drizzled all over the thing! Chuck a few bits of pita bread on top and yeah, it looks like a souvlaki had a bomb implanted in it which subsequently burst on your plate, leaving it’s yummy innards splayed upon the ceramic battlefield. I will say that they were not mucking about when they said they were using Mallee Lamb – this was really top quality meat! Very tender and succulent indeed, you will walk away from the table feeling fit to burst – the sign of a damn fine meal! Highly recommended!
