Beef Jerky vs Biltong: What's the Difference?

Both are dried meat. Both pack an almost absurd amount of protein into a small bag. Both quietly live in the snack drawer of every gym regular, weekend hiker, and "what do you mean I can't put steak in my carry-on" traveller in Europe.

But beef jerky and biltong are not the same thing. Not even close, once you bite in.

If you've ever stood in front of our shelf trying to decide which bag to grab, this guide is for you. By the end you'll know exactly how each one is made, how they taste, how they stack up nutritionally, and — most importantly — which one to throw in your bag for which moment.

The 30-second answer

Beef jerky is thin strips of marinated beef, dried with heat. It's chewy, often sweet-savoury, frequently smoked, and the flavour range stretches from "kindly polite" to "regret your life choices" on the same shelf.

Biltong is thicker chunks of beef cured in vinegar and spice, then air-dried at room temperature. It's softer, beefier, less sweet, with a clean tangy backbone from the vinegar cure.

Same starting ingredient, very different end product. Now let's get into the why.

How beef jerky is made

Jerky's roots are in the Americas. The name comes from ch'arki, a Quechua word for dried meat that Spanish colonisers borrowed and gradually mangled into "jerky". The basic idea — slice, season, dry — is older than anyone bothered to write down.

Modern beef jerky follows a tight recipe:

1. Slice lean beef (usually top round or silverside) into thin strips.
2. Marinate in a mix of soy sauce, sugar, salt and whatever the flavour calls for — teriyaki, honey-mustard, Korean BBQ, ghost pepper, the lot.
3. Dry with heat, typically in a dehydrator or low oven around 70 °C, sometimes with smoke for extra depth.

The heat does two jobs at once: it pulls moisture out, and it gets the meat hot enough to be food-safe. The result is a strip that's firm to the bite, chewy, and loud with flavour from whatever the marinade was doing.

How biltong is made

Biltong is South Africa's national snack and a hill we'll happily die on. Dutch settlers in the 17th century needed a way to preserve meat in a hot climate without refrigeration, so they adapted European curing traditions to local beef (and game).

The process looks nothing like jerky:

1. Cut beef — usually silverside — into thicker strips or whole muscles.
2. Soak in a vinegar bath (cider or brown vinegar) for a few hours. This is the magic step.
3. Rub with a spice mix dominated by coriander, salt, black pepper, and sometimes a touch of brown sugar.
4. Hang to air-dry at room temperature for four to seven days.

No heat, no smoke. Just vinegar, spice, and patience. The vinegar lowers the pH enough to keep the meat safe while it slowly loses water. You can stop the process early for "wet" biltong (still soft and steak-like in the middle) or let it run longer for "dry" biltong (closer to jerky's snap).

Taste and texture: side by side

Bite into a piece of beef jerky and you get a hit of sweetness and salt up front, then the marinade flavour — smoky, spicy, teriyaki, whatever — riding on top of the beef. Texture-wise, jerky pulls and chews. Some are pliable, some are a full-on jaw workout.

Biltong tastes more like beef. That sounds obvious until you try the two back-to-back and realise how much heavy lifting the marinade does for jerky's flavour profile. With biltong, the coriander and pepper hum in the background and the vinegar adds a clean, tangy finish, but the lead vocal is the meat itself. Texture is softer too — more melt than chew, especially in wet biltong.

If jerky is a flavoured candy bar made of beef, biltong is closer to a really, really good piece of cured ham — meaty, dense, savoury.

Protein, fat, and carbs: the nutritional showdown

Per 100 grams, the two are surprisingly close on the headline number — both deliver roughly 50 grams of protein, which is the main reason either ends up in a gym bag in the first place. The interesting differences hide in the carbs and the fat.

Carbs and sugar

Jerky typically has 10–25 grams of sugar per 100 g, mostly from the marinade. Biltong usually sits under 2 grams of carbs per 100 g, which makes it the default pick if you're tracking carbs, doing keto, or just don't fancy your snack tasting like dessert.

Fat

Biltong tends to run slightly higher in fat because it's not trimmed as aggressively — some traditional cuts keep a fat cap on purpose, and the spice rub is built around that flavour. Jerky is usually leaner by the time it hits the bag.

Sodium

Both are salty. They're cured meat. Biltong is often a touch lower because there's no sweet marinade to push back against.

Always read the back of the pack: the spread between individual products is bigger than the spread between categories. For exact macros across both styles, the USDA FoodData Central database lists them side by side.

Which one should you grab?

Pick beef jerky when:

• You want bold, marinade-driven flavour.
• You like a proper chew.
• You're snacking with people who think dried meat sounds weird — jerky is the gateway.
• You want a specific flavour mood: teriyaki at your desk, peri-peri on a road trip, something obnoxiously spicy at a party.

Pick biltong when:

• You're after pure beef flavour with minimal sugar.
• You're keto, low-carb, or just sugar-conscious.
• You prefer softer, melt-in-the-mouth texture.
• You're new to it and curious why South Africans get a little misty-eyed when the topic comes up. (We get it now too.)

And if you can't decide? Get both. They're not enemies, they're a snack-drawer dream team — one for when you want to bite into something, one for when you want to actually taste beef.

Try both for yourself

We're well past the days when biltong was a "buy it on holiday in Cape Town" souvenir. Across Europe you can now pick up properly made biltong from small producers who treat it with the same respect a butcher in Pretoria would.

Browse our full beef jerky range for over a hundred flavours, or jump straight to the biltong collection if you've already made up your mind. Not sure where to start? Our most popular jerky and biltong is the shortcut — every product on that page has already been voted for by customers who came back for a second bag.

Snack first, debate later.