Divine Bovine - Hot & Tangy Teriyaki

Next up in our series on Divine Bovine is this Hot & Tangy Teriyaki. See our other reviews of Divine Bovine.

Divine Bovine's beef jerky is based on beef brisket, which it claims to be more tender and sweet. The company describes it's story as beginning in Southern Italy when a butcher named "Pops" discovered a great recipe and cut of meat for jerky, who eventually handed it down to his grandson, who started the Divine Bovine brand.

This Hot & Tangy Teriyaki flavor is marketed as being "Gluten Free", and is described by the company as "..drenched in a mild blend of savory spices and "Pops" unique recipe, a wild fiery hot and sultry flavor combining the sweetness of pineapple juice with the fire of chili peppers."

Ingredients

Beef brisket, soy sauce, brown sugar, pineapple juice, granulated garlic, crushed red peppers, black pepper, ginger.

Taste

The first thing I taste from the surface of these pieces is a good deal of sweetness with a noticeable soy sauce. A light bit of heat comes on, as well as lightly noticeable garlic.

The chewing brings in a more defined soy sauce along with touches of chile pepper. The black pepper comes on more strongly.

For being marketed as "Hot & Tangy Teriyaki", it holds up somewhat. There's enough heat in this to be considered "hot", and there's something of a teriyaki flavor. Actually, it's more of a sweetened soy sauce, and doesn't have that characteristic fermented quality nor enough of the ginger that helps define true teriyaki. As for the "tangy" part of the name, it's a rather weak tanginess, probably not enough to really mention.

Otherwise, the flavors that seem to define this jerky starts mainly as a sweetened soy sauce flavored jerky, with a fair amount of heat. You get touches of chile pepper flavor and garlic, and a fair amount of black pepper in the back of the mouth.

The pineapple juice is hard to identify, as is the ginger. Moreover, the natural meat flavors are hard to identify through the heavier sweet.

As for the heat, it ranks on my personal heat scale as a "medium hot" (level 4 out of 5).

Meat Consistency

These appear to be slices of whole meat, sliced into strips and bits of small to medium sizes.

This is a semi-moist jerky with moist and sticky surface feel. These pieces are very flexible and soft, and chewing is very easy.

The chewing texture starts out feeling very soft, tender and moist. It takes on a mushy texture right away, and by the time it's chewed down to a soft mass, it feels mushy, and more comparable to ground beef cooked rare.

I can see some small spots of fat on some pieces, but otherwise its unremarkable. I don't see any gristle or tendon either. I do, however, encounter a good deal of stringiness, much of which mats down into unchewable wads.

As for clean eating, I pick up light amounts of stickiness on my fingers, requiring some licking and/or wiping before touching the keyboard.

Snack Value

Divine Bovine sells this Hot & Tangy Teriyaki beef jerky from its website at a price of $27.96 for a four-pack, with each package at 3.25oz. Shipping is free if you buy two or more orders. That works out to a price of $2.15 per ounce.

For general jerky snacking purposes, it's a decent value. Compared to major brands of jerky sold in stores, it has a better flavor, and it's more tender and easy to chew, but it feels mushy and it contains too much stringiness, leaving a lot of unchewable wads.

As a Hot & Tangy Teriyaki beef jerky, at the same $2.15 per ounce price, it's a weak value. While I get a decent amount of heat, I don't find much tanginess in the chewing, and the teriyaki is more like sweetened soy sauce than true teriyaki.

Rating

I'm giving this an average rating.

This Hot & Tangy Teriyaki beef jerky from Divine Bovine offers a tender and moist chewing experience with a good deal of flavor and a blood-warming heat. But despite the name of this variety, I didn't find any tangy chewing and it doesn't quite have an authentic Japanese-style teriyaki flavor, it's more like sweetened soy sauce.

It's still, however, quite snackable if you like the combination of sweet meets heat in a tender, moist chew. I can taste just enough of the chile pepper, as well as the garlic and black pepper, to create the kind of spicy snacking that I really like.

I knocked the rating down because it doesn't really live up to its advertised flavor, with a less-than-interesting teriyaki and very little tanginess. It's really more of a "sweet and hot" jerky. But just on its own merits, it's still a good jerky, that should satisfy the tender-moist jerky snackers who love hot foods.

Rating: Average (3/5)