These chubby little meat stick snacks were good!
Apparently they own or partially own Two Hot Chick’s jerky as well, which I have yet to try. I will get on that soon. But as far as Zoe’s goes, I liked the jalapeño stick the best of the three pictured here.
Lately I’ve been gravitating towards biltong for my meat snacking needs, rather than jerky (which can sometimes be loaded with lots of sugars). Biltong is a meat snack that originated in Africa. Generally this stuff is seasoned and dried whole muscle meat, sliced thin.
While both biltong and jerky are high in sodium, I sweat like a shitstain with all the running and physical activity I’m engaged in, so I don’t mind that so much.
What I like about biltong in particular is that it’s shaved nice and thin, and that means it’s almost always tender and not aggressively chewy. I had some jerky recently that made my jaw muscle sore for a week after eating. Fuck that noise.
Anyway, enter Stryve brand biltong. This stuff was the cheapest and had the largest portion sizes/bags that I could find on Amazon. They also had the most interesting flavors, like spicy peri peri and hatch chili.
Both the biltong and the meat sticks from these guys are great. Meat sticks are often times greasy and overly salty. Not these. They’re perfect.
A great way to satiate snack time hunger while also delivering protein, zinc and B-vitamins.
Give this brand a try. I fucking love it. The only down side is that the bags of biltong are an absolute BITCH to re-ziplock (yup – Ziplock is a brand, and I’m diluting it with genericide so that you know what the fuck I’m talking about). But if you call yourself a man, you should probably just crush the entire bag in one sitting anyway. There’s only two servings in the size I purchased.
Chomps brand beef sticks are similar in size and style to Slim Jim brand jerky sticks, but they are a bite more tender and less grainy. A nicer quality. My wife picked these up for me as a gift, and I liked them.
“Cracked Pepper & Sea Salt” (venison) and “Hoppin Jalepeno” (grass fed beef) were my favorite flavors.
Worth a shot!
I’ve been hitting the jerky hard lately, as you might have noticed. The reason why is because I have a sack of jerky packages and meat sticks from a recent food show that I attended. All these companies were giving out samples, and I grabbed as many as I could carry without ripping the ligaments from my arms. Slowly but surely I am getting through them all, one by one.
This is a unique meat protein: alpaca. It tastes like any other beef, chicken or pork stick. A little less greasy than some. Not grainy, good smoke flavor without too much casing skin. I liked it. It’s similar to some of the ones I tried from “Buffalo Bob’s” – unique proteins like gator, kangaroo, etc.
Anyway this one is pretty good. I still like the flat sticks from Buffalo Bob’s better, in terms of exotic protein snack sticks and jerkies. I think this was 50 calories based on an online search (nutritional info was not printed on the individual wrapper – likely on the multi-pack box though).
