Recipepapa: Pipikaula is Hawaiian Beef Jerky

Ingredients
• 2 lb Flank steak
• 3/4 c Soy sauce
• 2 tb Hawaiian salt
• 1 1/2 tb Sugar
• 1 Clove garlic; minced
• 1 Piece ginger; crushed
• 1 Red chili pepper; crushed

Preparation

Cut beef into strips about 1 1/3 inch wide. Combine all other ingredients and soak beef in the sauce overnight. When drying in the oven, set oven to 175 degrees. Place meat on a rack such as a cake cooking rack. Place rack on a cookie sheet and dry meat in oven for 7 hours. Keep in refrigerator.

Some people like to use a dry box to make pipikaula. I prefer to dry my pipikaula in the oven to prevent anything going wrong. See below.

Illnesses due to Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 from homemade jerky raise questions about the safety of traditional drying methods for making beef and venison jerky. The USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline’s current recommendation for making jerky safely is to heat meat to 160 °F before the dehydrating process. This step assures that any bacteria present will be destroyed by wet heat. But most dehydrator instructions do not include this step, and a dehydrator may not reach temperatures high enough to heat meat to 160 °F.
After heating to 160 °F, maintaining a constant dehydrator temperature of 130 to 140 °F during the drying process is important because:
• the process must be fast enough to dry food before it spoils; and
• it must remove enough water that microorganisms are unable to grow.