Making Fresh Tuna Jerky

With the fishing so incredible and the giant Tuna just off the coast, you now need to decide what to do with your catch.  There are many ways to prepare fresh Tuna, but one of my favorites is making fresh tuna jerky.  Of course, you can use just about any fish for this, but tuna is one of my favorites.

The Catch

The first step in creating delicious, fresh jerky is catching the fish.  Clearly you can use just about any fish you would like, but my go to is fresh caught tuna.  I caught the below Bluefin Tuna recently and had plenty of fish to go around. Once I packaged it all up and handed out to co-workers, friends and family, I still had a lot left.

The Tools

To make yourself some fresh tuna jerky, you only really need a few items.  A good cutting board and a sharp knife are a must, but also a good marinade and your smoker or oven.  You’ll also want to have some 1 gallon Ziploc bags handy for the marinade process.

For marinade, I always use the Soy Vay brand teriyaki sauce called Veri Veri Teriyaki.  It is nice and thick and coats the fish nicely.

For my smoker, I have both the Little Chief and Big Chief electric smokers.  For this project, I went with the Big Chief strictly for capacity.

The Tuna Prep

Now that you have all of your tools ready to go, you can start to prepare your fresh fish.  I had all of my tuna processed down at the landing.  They packaged it all up in nice 1 pound portions making it very nice to handle and divide up.

Once I have my bags cut open, I like to cut my fish into nice long strips of about 1/2″ x 1/2″ to 1″ x 1″ in size.  You can go a little bit bigger if you’d like, but the drying time will take just a bit longer.

Now that my fish is cut up in the portions that I like, I will insert it all into one of the 1 gallon size Ziploc bags.

From there I will dump the entire bottle of the Soy Vay Veri Very Teriyaki sauce into the bag to completely cover the fish.  I will knead it around and make sure that each piece is nicely covered.  The sauce has a good amount of sesame seeds in it, but I also like to add a few more shakes to give it a little more texture.

Once you have all of your fish in the bag and the marinade poured in, you have lots of time to relax.  I always recommend a minimum of 4 hours to let the fish marinade, but no more than 24 hours.  I’m sure it won’t hurt to go longer, but that is sort of my guideline.

Place your bag in the refrigerator and give it a good mix every couple of hours.

Tuna Drying Process

After the proper amount of time has passed you are ready to start to get your fish out and start the drying process.   A lot of people recommend rinsing off the fish with fresh water when you take it out of the bag, but I don’t do that.  In fact, I generally don’t let the fish air dry either.  I like to take them straight from the bag to the rack.

Give your fish nice even spacing on the dryer racks as to be sure that there is lots of air flow in between.  In the photo above, these are all just stacked on top of each other while I load the racks.

At this point you should go ahead and get your smoker going.  Get it up to the desired temperature and start to load your fish.

Give yourself nice even spacing and fill up the entire smoker.  Close up the front and you are done.  Go ahead and relax at this point.

Now here is where I differ from a lot of people.  With the Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki sauce, I will generally not use any actual smoke in my drying process.  No particular reason, I just enjoy the full flavor of the teriyaki.

For really thin cuts of fish you will probably only need about 4 hours of drying time, but with thicker cuts, you will be looking at roughly 6 to 8 hours or even longer.

After an initial 4 hours I’ll go ahead and check my fish.  You can tell you are starting to get to where you want to be where the fish starts to brown a bit.  Remember, we are going for jerky and not just smoked fish.

The Reward

Now that you have waited your entire time and your fish is nice and dry, it is time to remove it from the racks.  You’ve probably already sampled a couple of pieces straight from the rack at this point, heck, I always do.

Stack it all up nicely on a plate, or spread it out over some dry racks giving it ample time to cool.

Once your fish has cooled, you are ready to enjoy.  Shoot, of course you can eat it while it is still warm as well as we like to do.  Once other thing that I like to do if I make a big batch is to vacuum package it for future enjoyment.  I use the Foodsaver vacuum sealer and it works out just fine.  If I could afford it, I’d go big and get a fancy unit, but for what I am doing, they work just fine.

I hope you find this recipe easy to follow.  I do this for salmon, tuna and yellowtail.  It makes and excellent treat and of course, high in protein.  Make your packages small and manageable for all of your upcoming trips.  Such a great snack when out on the boat.

Recap

Here is a quick recap of the items that I used in this process and some links to the items.

Big Chief Smoker   On sale on Amazon for $115.09 right now.  Pretty incredible deal!

Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki Sauce

Ziploc Bags

Food Saver Vacuum Packer

For more fishing trip reports and adventures, please follow me at Davey’s World.

Happy fishing, and jerky making!
Davey