Today, as part of my doomsday preparations, I am trying to make beef jerky.

I think I made jerky a long time ago, but I don’t remember. This time, I looked at recipes online to get started. They all look pretty much alike, so I chose one from the Food Network, figuring their lawyers would have looked it over to make sure it couldn’t cause food poisoning.

The recipe is credited to Alton Brown, a guy I don’t trust. He makes biscuits with vegetable shortening, which is odd, and he slices steaks up and serves them lukewarm. He also promoted Shun knives and claimed he used them, but now he promotes, and claims to use, another brand. So he found a great set of products, liked it so much he stocked his own kitchen, and then inexplicable abandoned them and started using something else? Real cooks don’t do things like that. If something works, you keep it. Brown had some kind of problem with the Kershaw company, the real manufacturer of fake-Damascus Shuns. Either they let him go, or the money wasn’t right, or there was a dispute. There is no way he suddenly decided another company’s products were so much better he had to adopt them without a blink.

Shuns are fragile and very expensive. If you put one in the dishwasher next to flatware, there’s a good chance it will emerge with chunks missing from the edge. He had to know he was promoting junk.

If you can’t trust a celebrity cook with regard to one thing, why should you trust him about other things? But here I am, adapting his recipe anyway.

He uses a device known as a Blo-hard 3000 to make his jerky. Wild guess: this is a cardboard box with a fan. I don’t know, but I know he likes boxes, and I find it hard to believe there’s a real product called “Blo-Hard 3000.”

Might as well Google.

I can’t find much information, but a Youtube video says Alton Brown dries beef on air conditioner filters because they give a “tougher, longer-lasting texture” than dehydrators.

I think Alton Brown is once again confirming my suspicions about him. I am not sure why I would want a tougher product, and I have a lot of confidence in my ability to make jerky that will be as dry, and therefore long-lasting, as I want. If the dehydrator doesn’t get it dry enough, which would be odd, considering what dehydrators so, I can always put the meat in the fridge, uncovered, for a day or two. That really dries things out.

I’m not going to have a bunch of dirty air filters around my house, attracting bugs. Who does that?

It looks like he and other jerky chefs do not use heat.

I bought eye round roast, which is a rubber-like product useful chiefly for braising, a cooking method that can render nearly anything edible. I have read that eye round is a top choice because it has so little tasty fat in it. Fat can go rancid, so apparently, you want to keep it out of your jerky.

Based on what Alton Brown says, as well as some Googling, I chilled the meat to firm it up, sliced off the fat, sliced the meat very thinly, and put it in the fridge in a bag of marinade. Alton Brown’s marinade contains liquid smoke, which is one more strike against him in my book. It also contains honey, which is not the most flavorful meat condiment on earth.

Here is what I’m trying:

2/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
2/3 cup soy sauce
1 shot Harvey’s Bristol Cream
2 teaspoons pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 heaping teaspoon Thai chili sauce
1 tablespoon sorghum

Brown says to marinate for 3-6 hours. Once I’m done with that, I plan to smoke the meat for one hour with hickory at 200°, and then I’ll stick it in the dehydrator. The smoker should wipe out the bulk of the bacteria and mold and whatever, even if it isn’t necessary.

This pretty much has to be good. It’s smoked meat with a lot of salt, sugar, and acid added. I don’t think much can go wrong. As Jeremy Clarkson says, “How hard can it be?”

Brown says he has kept jerky for up to a year. Probably next to his Shun knives.

It would be a lot of work to dry enough beef to make a real dent in a post-election dystopic famine, but it can’t hurt. I also bought canned corned beef, so I’m not putting all my jerky in one basket.

I don’t know if jerky is cost-effective. I’m going to get nearly two pounds of jerky (pre-smoked weight), and I believe I paid $5 per pound. Adding half a bottle of Worcestershire and half a bottle of soy sauce run the price up quite a bit. Maybe a total of $15? I can weigh what comes out of the dehydrator and compare it to store prices. If it can’t be cheap, it can at least be better than factory food.