The Official Biltong Enthusiasts Thread

faniedry said:
its not about the heat on the meat

the heat of the bulb is supposed to dry out the air in the box, not your meat!!

/done
/really this time
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I know.

I don't know if you remember much from high school geography?

The way you measure how dry air is, is it's relative humidity, which is expressed in percent. 0% RH means not humid at all, 100% RH means as humid as it can be.

So what does RH actually mean? RH is the amount of water vapour currently in the air, divided by the carrying capacity of that air. Warm air can carry less humidity than cold air. This is why clouds form at high altitudes - as the air rises, the temperature drops, and the water vapour condenses into clouds.

Anyway, the point is, 10 degrees C air holds less water vapour than 20 degrees C air. Even if the amount of water vapour is the same, 20 degrees C air will feel drier. So, what we want to do is raise the temperature of the air to make it drier. The bulb is there to dry the air by heating it.

If the bulb is only at the top, it heats a small layer of air which then rises out of the box. If it is at the bottom, it heats a layer of air which then rises up out of the box, covering more of the box than if it was at the top.
 
faniedry said:
As a beginner, buy a mellerware biltong maker, and go from there... start with pre-mixed biltong spices, and see if you would like to make your own later.
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Thanks for that, what meats are you guys buying? I see spar sells biltong meat specifically for making biltong
 
some of the Spar shops sells raw meat cut to biltong size and a packet of biltong spices. All you need to get extra is the wet ingredients
 
faniedry said:
I think guys that stay in Durban have it worst... very humid air and they need to be careful not to make the box too hot otherwise you basically cook the meat, and will also get the hard outside and too moist inside.
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Years ago friends up the road went hunting on family farm and hung the entire garage full of biltong, all they used were a few normal household fans. I cannot remember though whether it was summer or winter.

Biltong was good but i'm forever off cooked game meat as we probably ate game for two months from all the meat they gave us.
 
Last edited:
Ancalagon said:
Cabonossi without pork is not cabonossi.

It's like saying you made bacon without pork. It isn't bacon.
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Yeah Kabanos is pork sausage. Kabanosy (better known to us as Cabanossi) is pork sausage mixed with red and or white meat with added pork bacon, then smoked. However, the Jewish people in Europe made similar smoked sausage using other cured meat than ‘unclean’ to replace the bacon. Cabanossi is used interchangeably whether bacon is added or not to the smoked sausage recipe.
 
thehuman said:
some of the Spar shops sells raw meat cut to biltong size and a packet of biltong spices. All you need to get extra is the wet ingredients
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At our Spar here, we actually do the drying for the customers, people bring their meat to us, sometimes with a recipe or not, then we make their biltong for them and use either our stainless steel drying cupboard or put it in our small drying room

The drying room is about 3m x 2m with heaters mounted on the wall and an extractor fan. there are about 20 lines for hanging on.....

The stainless steel drying cupboard is on the shop floor and is padlocked with a viewing window.... I often get customers standing there peering through the window wanting to pick a piece of biltong out, only to find that the entire batch belongs to a single customer...

:o
 
I will be hanging up some cabanossi this weekend looking forward to it
 
I have been using 42 watt coloured lightbulbs they have been the only old school lightbulbs I could find, however, even these are becoming scarce. What wattage of the halogen type bulbs would somebody suggest would work as well?
 
KingLuc said:
I have been using 42 watt coloured lightbulbs they have been the only old school lightbulbs I could find, however, even these are becoming scarce. What wattage of the halogen type bulbs would somebody suggest would work as well?
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go to builders warehouse you find bulbs
 
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