I’ve sold
jerky before.

The first time was in Seoul, in 2014 — a bar I built and ran for about a year. Concrete walls, a crown on the sign, a place called Vamos. The jerky wasn’t the business. It was the thing people kept asking for. I made it in the back, and they came back for it.

Building that bar did something I didn’t expect: it made me want to design spaces. So in 2015 I left for art school in Atlanta, and in 2018 for New York. I became a designer. I taught. I didn’t make jerky for ten years. I found the outdoors late, the way city people do — a weekend at a time.

Last December, on the Kepler Track in New Zealand, I bought jerky at the trailhead because it was light. I couldn’t finish the bag. Salt, smoke, and not much else. What surprised me wasn’t that it was bad. It was that this is what jerky had become: fuel. Something you eat because you have to.

I knew it could be food. I’d made it.

Brooklyn Outdoor Dad is that jerky, made properly, in small runs, at a USDA-inspected smokehouse a day’s drive from my kitchen. Two recipes — both things I actually cook — and a short list of ingredients you can read out loud.

I became a dad this spring. The adventures are shorter now. This is for those.

— Soonk