Biltong vs. Jerky
Biltong vs Jerky: Never the twain shall m-eat
There are beef snacks and there are healthy, tasty, sustainable, succulent beef snacks.
Put it this way, if you are sitting on the sofa downing beer and chomping crisps, you could just as well be snacking on jerky. But if you are walking out of the gym and need a quality protein hit to help you recover, only biltong will do. Don't be jerky. Do m-eat! biltong. No bull!
Here's five things to chew on:
- Jerky is made from sirloin, flank or round beef cuts. Don't get us wrong, processed meat can be tasty but it is also full of (bad) saturated fat. If you're already absorbing enough healthy fats as part of your diet don't OD on the jerky. Although biltong, which can be made from similar much of the saturated fat is lost as part of the curing process.
- m-eat! is only made from top grade silverside from certified Scotch farms. Top notch stuff and fully traceable. It is tough for UK meat farms to get certified (as in much, much tougher than our biltong). It is even tougher to stay certified. We only source beef from farms which have stayed certified for a long period. So that means m-eat! packs 54g of protein and only 4g of fat per 100g. Jerky does not come close to those protein levels.
- You need to add more salt to jerky to cure it. In fact many jerky makers also resort to MSG to keep the salt content down. There is a load of bad press around MSG and its bad effects on your health. Do you really want to risk putting something in your body that might cause nausea, asthma, chest pain or face-swelling? Nope, not us either. Too much salt or too much MSG - well its neither with m-eat!
- Jerky is almost always smoked. The smoking process has got to be spot on or else it can be really, really bad for you. So don't risk it people - stick to biltong. Biltong is cured using salt, pepper, malt vinegar (cider vinegar for go m-eat), coriander and that's pretty much it. It is never smoked. So it is ‘clean'. Many biltong makers cut corners by sprinkling some spice after drying their meat. We do it the other way around - it is always best to infuse before air-drying your m-eat to max that m-eat! taste. This is harder, takes longer and we do it this way because it's better for you.
- Finally, jerky is sliced thinly with the grain before it is cured. Biltong is cured first (think, big, flavoursome chunks) then sliced across the grain, usually less thinly than jerky. This actually allows biltong to hold more flavour than jerky, notwithstanding all of that fat, salt, MSG type stuff those jerky people have to use. Now you get why we don't need all that stuff.
Are you getting why m-eat biltong is more gym than sofa yet? Hope so... And remember, always be biltong bro. Don't be jerk(y!).