The Jerky Guy Beef Jerky Press Page

The Jerky Guy ® Beef Jerky Company was featured in the San Jose Mercury News. The following is that article from June 2nd, 1999.

Food guys -- jerky
Hoping years of practice makes perfect
BY MIKE CASSIDY
Mercury News Staff Writer

IT MAY NOT be what Jon Beltran's mother wished for him when she was showing him around the stove, but Beltran is proud to be The Jerky Guy.
There is honor in jerky, Beltran says, and he came by the name the hard way. Well, actually, the name itself wasn't so hard. The guys he played pool with pinned it on him, because he always had beef jerky to share.
It was the jerky itself that proved difficult.
``I went through a lot of meat,'' he says of his early experiments. ``I'd end up throwing it out almost every time for the first two or three months.''
But now, Beltran and partner Robert Young are behind Better Than Yours Inc., a new San Jose-based beef jerky company and one of Silicon Valley's latest start-ups. Though their chips are wood chips and their R&D team is armed with toothpicks and dental floss, not keyboards and pocket protectors, they take their fledgling business seriously.
Beef jerky: The serious dried meat snack.
Beltran says that by the end of the month, his company's The Jerky Guy jerky will be selling in about a half-dozen stores.
For now, the men make their jerky at the Neto Sausage Co. in Santa Clara, but they have big plans. Beltran says the partners plan to expand with venture capital and eventually expect to be running a 10,000-square-foot jerky plant. They already have a Web site, www.thejerkyguy.com, offering e-jerky.
What the partners have in hand is some impressive jerky. The hot versions of their original and teriyaki flavors are enough to send all but the most serious pepperheads rushing for a glass of water, or the garden hose or the centerpiece flower vase -- anything to calm the burn. But the meat is chewy, without being sticky or crumbly.
The mild original and teriyaki flavors provide a pleasant blend of spices and a moist sensation that most over-the-counter jerky is missing. And their burgundy-flavored jerky (the result of a late-night recipe mix-up) sounds plain fun.
``Catering to the yuppies in Napa Valley and L.A. and Silicon Valley'' is the way Beltran puts it. (The company eventually plans to offer the burgundy as well as jalapeño and black pepper flavors, though none of those was ready to sample.)
Beef jerky is simple food -- right up there with pork rinds at both the convenience store and in American culinary lore -- but finding just the right jerky flavoring is anything but simple.
Beltran chased his recipes for years, pursuing it as a hobby when not working his day job as an officer at the Santa Clara County Juvenile Detention Center. He was an avid chef, always looking for something new. He started cooking seriously at 13.
``My mom got tired of cooking for me between meals,'' Beltran says, ``because I was an eating machine.''
And so she taught him to cook for himself. At 18, he was subscribing to Gourmet magazine. And years later, after a hunting trip with buddies, he decided to try his hand at smoked meats. He bought an outdoor smoker and found particular inspiration in a beef jerky recipe he came across.
``How hard can beef jerky be?'' He remembers thinking at the time. ``I can make French food, soufflés. This is going to be fun.''
In no time at all, he was making batches of jerky that was tougher than leather and entirely inedible. He tried different wood. Different temperatures.
``Eventually, I started getting the hang of it,'' he says, ``to where it was palatable, to where you could actually eat it.'' It was a start. He continued to adjust ingredients, wood and temperatures.
``After about two years, I came to a point when I said, `I've got something here that's really, really good.' ''
His friends and family loved it.
``Of course,'' he says, ``everybody loves something that's free.''
But Beltran, 38, would think about the jerky when he'd think about how he wanted to get out of the juvenile corrections game. And then one day, he met Young, 31, a fellow officer who had something Beltran didn't even know he needed: teriyaki.
``His teriyaki was out of this world,'' Beltran says. Young says the family recipe was created generations ago in China and carried to Hawaii by his ancestors who settled there.
``Over the years,'' he says, ``it was passed from my grandmother to my father to me.''
When Beltran met Young, the keeper of the teriyaki was also looking to get out of the juvenile probation business. Soon both men saw jerky as their ticket out.
Both left the juvenile probation deptartment temporarily and took night jobs as bartenders, leaving their days to work on the business and care for their children (Beltran has a 2-year-old daughter and Young has three sons, 5, 3 and 8 months) while their wives worked. At night, Ericka Beltran, who works in shipping and receiving at Alza Corp., looks after the couple's daughter and works out plans to package and ship jerky. Amy Young, a bookkeeper at SMC Pneumatics, takes care of the Young boys and works on Better Than Yours purchase orders and invoices.
``It's rough on the family,'' Young says. ``We don't really see each other.''
But both men are convinced they are onto something big. So big, they're willing to share only so much. They say they are the only two who know the company's jerky recipes. Yes, they're written down in a safe place. ``Under lock and key,'' Beltran says. ``We won't tell you where.''
Beltran will, however, offer some advice for those who want to make their own jerky. (See recipes at left.) ``Other than that,'' Beltran says, ``have fun.''
Oh, he did provide one other suggestion.
``After they get tired of screwing it up and throwing it out,'' he says, ``they can come buy our stuff.''

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
By the end of the month, The Jerky Guy jerky will be carried by Neto Sausage Co., Santa Clara; The Old Fashioned Butcher Shoppe and Deli, San Jose; Cooking Etc., San Jose; Moon Video, Pager and Cellular, San Jose; Village Video, San Jose. For more information call the jerky line: (408) 792-3310.

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