Making biltong

This was my first foray into curing and drying meats, but it's something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I can't remember the first time that I tasted biltong, but I do know that I've always liked it. During the last year or so I've also had this nagging feeling that, "I can do this", and when I recently received a book from my SA friend Jennie called "Make you own Bilton and Droewors", it was time to step up.

I have to say that the book might have been a little more detailed, assuming that it's geared towards people who would like to make biltong for the first time at home. Thus, it might be a bit excessive in the included salt/spice charts to use 25 kgs and 50 kgs of meat as example weights. Either that or the 0.7 kgs of meat that I used is below consideration. "To make biltong, take one cow..."

The procedure described is first to salt and spice the meat and leave it overnight, and then in the morning, quickly dip it in a water/vinegar mix and then hang it up to dry. Easy enough, until you look on the internet, where everybody else bastes the meat in a vinegar/tabasco/Worcestershire sauce and then salts and spice the meat and leave it overnight before hanging it up to dry. After careful consideration (Tabasco? Hell yeah!) I went for the latter way of doing it.

Select pieces of cow.

I got some faux file from the supermarket, slightly less than 25 kgs, sliced it up and prepared the spice mix.

1 part salt.
1/2 part sugar.
1/2 part crushed coriander seeds.
A small amount of bicarbonate.
A healthy dose of chili powder.

Faux file and faux Tabasco.

I mixed two vinegar solutions, one with Worcestershire sauce and one with Tabasco-ish. I basted the meat with the vinegar solutions and dusted it with the spice mix and left it in the fridge overnight.

Spice em up!

To dry the biltong, people used to hang the meat from the rafters of their houses and let it airdry over time. Most people now uses a biltong box, which in its simplest form is a cardboard box with a lightbulb in it, trusting convection to create the airflow that dries the meat. Living in France, I used a wooden winecrate.

Yummyness in a box.

Hung the meat in the box and let the light do its magic. Normaly should this process take about 3-4 days, so I was rather surprised that it was already done the day after, but probably due to not useing a whole cow, the process took a bit shorter time.

I made this!

So, "I can do this"? Yep. Tasted just like the shop bought variant, although I was a bit surprised that there wasn't any hotness to it, considering the amount of Tabaco and chili powder used, but next time... :)