Pecos Bill is a brand owned by Marfood USA. Marfood USA is the new name of Mirab USA, which is the largest private labeler of beef jerky. Marfood USA is owned by Marfrig Group, a Brazilian-based food manufacturer.
Marfood USA also owns the Pemmican brand of beef jerky. From my observations, both brands of jerky offer the same exact recipe and cuts of meat.
These "Beef Steak Nuggets" from the Pecos Bill brand appears to be an answer to the nuggets that Jack Link's produced with much success. I found them at The Beef Jerky Store in Las Vegas, NV.
Beef, brown sugar, water, salt, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, garlic powder, black pepper powder, smoke flavor powder, citric acid, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite.
Taste
The first thing I taste from the surface of these pieces is a light sweetness, and a strange flavor that almost resembles like putting a Crayon in your mouth.
The chewing flavor starts with some saltiness, maybe a bit more sweet, and some noticeable black pepper. There's some kind of meaty flavor in there too, and some sense of the liquid smoke.
The overall flavor of these Beef Steak Nuggets seems to be the same flavor as Marfood's regular beef jerky if you're familiar with it. You can read my reviews of Pemmican Original, Big Ben's Original, or Tony Stewart's Original. It's mostly a combination of sweet, liquid smoke, and some black pepper.
But I think these Beef Steak Nuggets have more of a meaty flavor due to the thicker cuts of meat. But don't take that as meaning a natural meat flavor. There's little natural in the way these taste. But they do offer a flavor that resembles meat. A few of these nuggets actually tasted rancid, like something went wrong. But most of them were ok.
The level of saltiness in this seems moderate. After eating several of these, they build up to a higher degree, but still not what I consider a "high" saltiness.
That waxy, Crayon flavor that I described on the surface of these nuggets mixes into the chewing flavor, and I can identify it as I chew.
Overall, what you're going to taste in this is mostly a combination of light sweet, some liquid smoke, a moderate saltiness, and a moderate black pepper. There's a bit of a meat flavor, but more of a processed meat flavor.
Meat Consistency
These nuggets appear to be a chunked & formed jerky, extruded into square-formed lengths, and then cut into bite-sized pieces.
It's a dry jerky, with a waxy surface feel. The nuggets feel like stiff plastic, and are overall a little labored in chewing.
The chewing texture starts out feeling like stiff, but maleable plastic with a waxy initial feel. It actually breaks apart with only a few chews, and at that point it renders into a soft mass pretty quickly. By then, it feels somewhat crumbly. The chunked & formed consistency seems to prevent it from feeling like real meat.
In eating these nuggets I didn't find any unchewable chunks of tissues, nor anything unusually crunchy, or too hard to chew. But I did find plenty of stringy tissues.
And these nuggets are pretty clean eating, no residue on my fingers.
Snack Value
I paid $12.50 for this 16oz package at The Beef Jerky Store in Las Vegas, NV. That works out to a price of $0.78 per ounce.
For general jerky snacking purposes, at the $0.78 per ounce price, it's a fair value. It's actually not very snackable with a subpar flavor and a subpar meat consistency and chewing texture. That price is far lower than what you'll pay for major brands of jerky at the grocery store, yet is probably worth that price.
Rating
I'm giving this a fair rating.
These Beef Steak Nuggets from Pecos Bill don't really provide any kind of favorable flavor for me, it's mostly just a blend of light sweet, black pepper, some saltiness, and liquid smoke. That's pretty much basic, ordinary jerky flavor. It's actually the same flavor I found in regular beef jerky made by Marfood (Mirab USA).
These nuggets do offer more meat flavor than Marfood's regular beef jerky, but only because of the thicker chunks of meat. And this isn't chunks of whole meat either, it's a chunked & formed product and tends to have a crumbly chewing texture.
There's also a waxy surface feel that even adds a bit of a Crayon flavor, if you can remember eating Crayons as a kid. Overall, even though I can tolerate these things, I'm going to give the rest of these nuggets to my dogs.
My recommended beer pairing would be a double IPA, you'll want the full aroma and flavor of hops and malt to cancel out the lackluster flavor of these nuggets. Try the Russian River Pliny the Elder, or if you can find it the Grand Teton Brewing Lost Continent IPA.
Rating: Fair
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