Cattle grazing on open pastureland at golden hour, the pasture-raised beef behind Farmer Bill's biltong.

What Is Biltong? The South African Beef Snack America Is Discovering

What's in this guide

Most Americans' first question about biltong is reasonable: "Is this just fancy jerky?" It isn't. Biltong is air-dried, cured whole-muscle beef from South Africa, made with salt, vinegar, and spices, and never exposed to heat. The process is older than the country you're reading this in.

The word itself is Afrikaans: "bil" meaning buttock or rump, and "tong" meaning strip or tongue. The name describes both the cut and the shape. Hindquarter cuts, sliced into strips, cured and hung to dry. That's it. No dehydrators, no ovens, no liquid smoke.

America is just now catching up to what South Africans have known for four centuries.

  • Biltong is whole-muscle beef, air-dried with salt, vinegar, and spices. No heat is applied at any stage.
  • The air-drying process preserves more protein per ounce than heat-based methods because high heat denatures protein.
  • Traditional biltong contains no added sugar, no MSG, no sodium nitrate, and no seed oils.
  • The name itself is a quality signal: by definition, anything labeled biltong must be air-dried.
  • Biltong is a snack America is discovering for the first time, and the timing makes sense.

At a glance

A quick reference for what separates biltong from other dried meat snacks.

Feature Biltong Commercial Beef Jerky
Process Air-dried, never cooked Heat-dehydrated or oven-dried (160°F+)
Primary ingredients Beef, salt, vinegar, coriander, black pepper Beef, soy sauce, sugar, preservatives, additives
Added sugar None (traditional) 6-12g per serving in most commercial products
Protein per oz ~16g (Farmer Bill's nutrition label) Typically 7-10g
Texture Chewy, moist, steak-like Dry, hard, lean
Cut used Whole-muscle hindquarter cuts (top round) Lean strips, often thin-cut
Sodium nitrate None Common in commercial brands
Carbohydrates 0-1g per serving (no added sugar) Often 6-12g per serving
Origin South Africa, 17th century United States, Native American smoking traditions

The Simple Definition: What Biltong Actually Is

Biltong is air-dried, cured beef. The meat is coated in salt, wetted with vinegar, seasoned with spices, and then hung in a ventilated space to dry over time. No heat source is involved at any point in the process.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. Heat cooking denatures the protein in meat. Air-drying doesn't. The protein is preserved while the moisture drops and bacteria levels fall, which means more protein makes it to the final product intact.

The core ingredients are simple: beef, coarse salt, vinegar (traditionally apple cider or malt), whole coriander seeds, and black pepper. That's the traditional recipe. No binders, no preservatives, no sweeteners. The ingredient list for real biltong is short enough to read in five seconds.

Anything sold under the name biltong is, by the definition of the product, air-dried. The process isn't optional. If it was cooked, it isn't biltong.

Where Biltong Comes From: A Brief History Worth Knowing

Before the Dutch Arrived

The practice of preserving meat through salting and drying didn't originate with European settlers. Indigenous Southern African peoples, including the San and Khoikhoi, were using these methods long before the Dutch arrived at the Cape in the 1600s. They understood what moisture removal and salt did to meat. The settlers who came later learned from what was already there.

The Voortrekkers and the Recipe That Stuck

Dutch settlers making the Great Trek inland from the Cape Colony in the 1830s and 1840s needed food that wouldn't spoil on long overland journeys with no refrigeration. They needed protein that could travel. Air-dried, cured meat fit the requirement: lightweight, shelf-stable, high in protein, and genuinely edible weeks after being made.

They brought their own additions to the process: vinegar, coriander, and black pepper. These became the flavor signature of what we now call biltong. The vinegar served a practical purpose beyond flavor (more on that in the next section), and coriander became so central to the recipe that it's still the defining spice of traditional biltong today.

I describe it simply: steak on the go. That framing holds up. The Voortrekkers weren't making a snack. They were solving a survival problem, and the solution they landed on is still the one we're using.

From Trail Food to Cultural Icon

In South Africa, biltong is a staple, not a specialty item or boutique product. Every family has a version of the recipe. Coriander and pepper are the constants; everything else varies by household, region, and preference. It's the kind of food that carries family memory.

How Biltong Is Made: The Process That Makes It Different

The Meat: Cut and Thickness Matter

Traditional biltong comes from hindquarter cuts: silverside, topside (top round), and eye of round. The Afrikaans word "bil" (buttock) reflects this. These are whole-muscle cuts, not ground or reformed meat.

At Farmer Bill's, biltong is made from top round, which carries more marbling than the very lean cuts used in most commercial jerky. That marbling stays in the final product. A good piece of biltong eats like a dry-aged steak because the fat hasn't been stripped out or cooked off.

Biltong is traditionally cut thicker than jerky, usually around 2-3 cm before curing, and it's sliced with the grain of the muscle. That's part of what creates the chewy, fibrous texture. Some connective tissue is normal and expected in a whole-muscle cut. It's collagen, not a defect.

The Cure: What Goes In (and What Doesn't)

The curing process uses four traditional ingredients: coarse salt, vinegar, coriander, and black pepper. Each one does something specific.

Salt pulls moisture out of the meat through osmosis, raising the water activity to a point where most pathogens can't survive. Vinegar's acidity lowers the pH and creates an additional barrier against bacterial growth. Apple cider vinegar, which is what Farmer Bill's uses, is a useful ingredient in its own right and one that a lot of health-conscious consumers already appreciate. Coriander and black pepper add the flavor that makes biltong taste like biltong.

What's not in the cure matters just as much: no sodium nitrate, no sodium nitrite, no sugar, no MSG, no high-fructose corn syrup, no soy sauce, no liquid smoke, and no artificial stabilizers or binding agents. The ingredient list is short because nothing else is needed.

Vinegar's preservation role is well-documented. The acetic acid in vinegar inhibits bacterial growth by lowering pH below the threshold at which most pathogens, including Clostridium botulinum, can survive (below pH 4.6).1 Salt's role works through osmosis: drawing water from the meat raises water activity to a level inhospitable to microbial growth. These aren't marketing claims. They're basic food microbiology, understood for centuries and confirmed by modern food science.

The Dry: Why No Heat Changes Everything

After curing, the meat hangs in a ventilated space and dries over time. Air circulates around the strips, moisture leaves, and protein concentrates as the texture firms up from the outside in.

No heat is applied. This is the critical difference from jerky, which the USDA requires to be heat-treated to an internal temperature of 160°F for commercially sold products. That heat kills bacteria, but it also denatures the protein in the meat. When protein denatures under high heat, the structure changes and some of that protein becomes less bioavailable. Air-drying doesn't trigger the same denaturation. The protein stays intact.

The practical result: Farmer Bill's biltong contains approximately 16 grams of protein per ounce. That figure comes from our own nutrition label, and you can verify it right there. For reference, most commercial beef jerky products land in the 7-10 gram range per ounce.

The specific drying time varies by cut thickness, humidity, and airflow. Farmer Bill's doesn't publish a fixed number of days because conditions vary, but the process takes the time it takes. Rushing it isn't an option. You can't air-dry beef faster by adding heat without making a different product entirely.

Protein denaturation under heat is a well-understood process. When muscle proteins are exposed to temperatures above roughly 140-150°F, the strands unfold and the tertiary structure breaks down, the same mechanism that changes cooked meat's color and texture. Air-drying at ambient temperature avoids that threshold, so the protein keeps its native structure. The high protein-per-ounce figure comes mainly from moisture loss: air-drying removes roughly half the weight as water, concentrating the protein that remains.2

What Does Biltong Taste Like?

The best comparison is a dry-aged steak, sliced thin. You get the savory depth of cured beef, the slight tang from the vinegar (subtle in the final product, not sharp), and the earthy, almost floral note that coriander adds. Black pepper gives it a gentle heat in the finish.

The texture is chewier than jerky and moister. It doesn't crumble or snap. You're chewing actual steak muscle, and that's what it feels like. Some pieces will have visible fat marbling that has firmed up during the drying process. That fat carries flavor. Don't cut it off.

First-time buyers sometimes expect the texture of jerky and are surprised by the chew. That's a calibration issue, not a product defect. Eat it the way you'd eat a piece of steak. Take a bite, chew it. If it requires work, that's because it's whole muscle, not because something went wrong.

At Farmer Bill's, the Original flavor is coriander, pepper, and salt: the traditional recipe, nothing added. The Smokehouse uses smoked paprika and onion powder for a deeper, more savory profile. Garlic & Herb brings in basil, rosemary, and parsley alongside American-grown garlic. The Spicy Chili is made with datil pepper, an heirloom pepper from St. Augustine, Florida, with its own distinct heat and flavor. Each flavor is built on the same clean base; the spice profile changes, the biltong process doesn't.

Biltong vs. Beef Jerky: The Honest Comparison

The comparison is inevitable. If you've grown up in America, beef jerky is your frame of reference for dried meat. Start there.

Jerky was historically America's meat snack because of the smoking and drying traditions that Native American cultures developed long before European contact. It became a commercial product, and that commercialization changed it. Most of what's sold as beef jerky today contains added sugar, soy sauce, MSG, sodium nitrate, and various stabilizers to extend shelf life and create consistency at scale. It's technically a meat product. It's also genuinely ultra-processed.

Biltong is the older method, just from a different part of the world. Salt, vinegar, and air. No heat, no preservatives, no sweeteners.

The texture difference is significant. Commercial jerky uses lean cuts, sliced thin, dried hard. The result is what I call "hard cardboard": dry, tough, with very little fat and not much flavor beyond the marinade. Biltong uses thicker whole-muscle cuts that retain their fat and moisture. It eats like meat, not like a snack strip.

For a full side-by-side breakdown of ingredients, process, and nutrition, the biltong vs. jerky comparison covers it in detail. The short version: they're both dried beef, and that's about where the similarity ends.

Why the Beef Source Matters

Not all biltong is equal, and the difference starts with the animal.

Most commodity beef in the American market is internationally sourced, processed domestically, and sold as an American product. The beef can come from Uruguay or Brazil, run through a US facility, and land on a shelf with no indication of where the animal was raised. This is legal. It doesn't mean it's traceable or that the animal was raised to any particular standard.

Farmer Bill's sources pasture-raised beef from Florida ranchers, through Florida Beef Incorporated. The animals are grass-fed and pasture-raised on Florida pastures. The supply chain is American from start to finish, and it's the kind of operation where the sourcing is actually known, not assumed.

One visible signal of the difference: the fat. Grass-fed, pasture-raised cattle develop yellow fat. Conventional grain-finished feedlot beef has white fat. This isn't cosmetic. The fat color reflects what the animal ate and how it was raised, and it corresponds to a different fatty acid profile in the final product.

On the nutrition side, research consistently shows that pasture-raised beef has a more favorable omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio compared to grain-finished feedlot beef. Farmer Bill's doesn't make strict grass-finished claims. The position is honest: not conventional CAFO beef, not the most extreme grass-finished premium tier. Pasture-raised, grass-fed, American-sourced beef from ranchers who are doing it the right way.

I'll put it plainly: I'm not conventional, but I'm not on the extreme end. That's an honest middle-ground position, and it shows up in the product.

Multiple peer-reviewed studies support the nutritional differences between pasture-raised and feedlot beef. A widely cited analysis found that grass-fed beef carried significantly higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than grain-finished beef.3

Why Carnivore and Keto Eaters Reach for Biltong

The carnivore and low-carb crowd has a problem with most meat snacks: sugar. It's almost universal in commercial jerky and beef sticks. Dextrose, cane sugar, honey, brown sugar, maltodextrin, in various combinations depending on the brand, show up across most of the category. For someone eating zero or very low carbohydrates, most of the meat snack aisle is effectively off the table.

Farmer Bill's biltong has no added sweeteners. Zero. The macros are what you'd want: high protein, meaningful fat from the marbling, essentially zero carbohydrates. For someone on a carnivore or strict keto protocol, that matters.

The fat content is a feature here, not a compromise. Saturated fat from quality beef supports the kind of diet these eaters are actually trying to eat. The retained marbling from top round is not something to apologize for. It's part of what makes the product eat like steak and what makes it genuinely satiating as a snack.

For a portable, high-protein, zero-sugar meat option, biltong fits the profile better than almost anything else in the dried meat category. Explore the full lineup if you want to see what that looks like in practice.

How to Identify Real Biltong

The first thing to do is read the ingredient list. Real biltong has a short one: beef, salt, vinegar, coriander, black pepper, and any additional spices specific to the flavor. If you see soy sauce, dextrose, sodium nitrate, binding agents, or a long list of stabilizers, that's not a traditional biltong product regardless of what it's called.

The second thing to check is sourcing. If the label doesn't state that the beef is American-sourced, you can reasonably assume it isn't. International beef processed in the US can legally be labeled as a domestic product. If sourcing matters to you, look for it explicitly.

The third thing is the process itself. The word "biltong" is definitional: it means air-dried. If a product is labeled as biltong, by the nature of what biltong is, it must have been air-dried rather than heat-cooked. The name carries that standard. If you see "biltong-style" or "biltong-inspired" on a product that went through a dehydrator at high heat, that's a different thing wearing the name.

A related term worth knowing: droewors (spelled d-r-o-e-w-o-r-s) is the traditional South African air-dried beef stick, the biltong equivalent in stick form. It's technically the correct term for air-dried beef sticks. Most American shoppers have never heard of it, which is why Farmer Bill's simply calls them air-dried beef sticks. Same standard applies: air-dried, no heat.

Biltong in America: Why Now

America didn't forget biltong. It never had it. Jerky was the domestic dried meat tradition, built on Native American smoking methods that go back long before European contact. Biltong was South African, and it largely stayed there until recently.

What's changed is the consumer. There's a growing number of Americans who have decided that the more processed a food is, the more skeptical they should be of it. That's not a fringe view anymore. It shows up in the rise of interest in traditional food methods, the scrutiny of ingredient labels, and the general pushback against ultra-processed products that have dominated grocery store shelves for decades.

My take is straightforward: the more processed something is, the worse the quality and nutrients. Biltong fits the current moment because it's a traditional preservation method that produces a clean, high-protein product without the industrial shortcuts that define most of the snack aisle.

To understand more about the philosophy behind how Farmer Bill's approaches sourcing and production, the about page lays it out directly.

If you want to try biltong made from pasture-raised Florida beef with no added sweeteners, no preservatives, and real spices, the full collection is here. First-time subscribers get 20% off the first order, and subscription orders after that are discounted 8%, so a first subscription order is roughly 26% off. There are also free gifts that come with the subscription program, and you can earn Bitcoin rewards through the Oshi app on every order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Biltong made by domestic American producers is completely legal and produced under USDA food safety regulations. The confusion comes from restrictions on importing traditionally made South African biltong, which has historically run into USDA FSIS requirements around processing and pathogen reduction for imported cured meats. Farmer Bill's makes biltong domestically in compliance with all applicable food safety standards. There's nothing legally ambiguous about buying or eating American-made biltong.

Are jerky and biltong the same thing?

No. They're both dried beef, but the process, ingredients, texture, and flavor are different. Jerky is heat-dried, usually at 160°F or above, often with sugar, soy sauce, and various preservatives in the marinade. Biltong is air-dried with no heat, cured with vinegar and salt, and seasoned with coriander and black pepper. Jerky is lean and hard; biltong is whole-muscle and chewy. The protein content is also meaningfully different because heat denatures protein. For a full breakdown, the biltong vs. jerky post covers it in detail.

Is biltong healthier than beef jerky?

Traditional biltong compares well on the metrics that matter to health-conscious consumers: no added sugar, no sodium nitrate, no artificial preservatives, high protein, minimal carbohydrates. Most commercial beef jerky contains added sugar (6-12g per serving in many products), MSG, and synthetic preservatives. That said, the actual nutritional value of any biltong depends on what goes into it. Cheap biltong can include soy sauce, binding agents, and low-quality inputs. The honest answer is: quality varies by brand. Read the ingredient list.

What kind of meat is biltong made from?

Traditionally, biltong is made from beef hindquarter cuts: silverside, topside (top round), and eye of round. The Afrikaans name reflects this, with "bil" meaning buttock or rump. These are whole-muscle cuts, not ground or reformed meat. In Southern Africa, game meats like ostrich, kudu, and springbok are also traditional. Farmer Bill's makes beef biltong only, using top round sourced from pasture-raised cattle in Florida.

Why is biltong so chewy?

Biltong is made from whole-muscle cuts, which means you're chewing actual beef muscle fiber. The grain runs through the cut, and that fibrous structure requires real chewing. Some pieces will have connective tissue, which is normal for any whole-muscle product. Think of it the way you'd think about chewing steak. The difference from jerky is that jerky is often sliced thin across the grain, which breaks up the fiber and produces a different texture. Biltong chew is a feature of the product, not a quality problem.

Why does biltong cost more than jerky?

The air-drying process causes roughly a 50% yield reduction. A significant portion of the original weight is moisture, and that moisture leaves during drying. What you're paying for is concentrated protein and the time it takes to produce it. Biltong from Farmer Bill's runs approximately 16 grams of protein per ounce, which is substantially higher than most commercial jerky. When you account for protein per dollar rather than weight per dollar, the gap narrows considerably. The sourcing matters too: pasture-raised Florida beef costs more than commodity feedlot beef.

What does the fat on biltong slabs mean?

The fat cap on biltong slabs is traditional and intentional. Biltong is made from cuts that carry natural marbling, and that fat is retained through the air-drying process rather than cooked off. The fat carries flavor and provides the fatty acid content that makes biltong genuinely satiating. If you're buying slabs and you see yellow fat, that's a signal of pasture-raised, grass-fed beef. White fat indicates grain-finished feedlot cattle. The yellow color comes from beta-carotene in the grass the cattle ate.

How do I know if biltong is made from American beef?

Read the label. If it doesn't explicitly state American sourcing, you should assume the beef may be from overseas. International beef processed in the US can legally be marketed as a domestic product. Farmer Bill's sources beef from Florida ranchers through Florida Beef Incorporated, and all of it is American-raised. There's no international beef in the supply chain.

What flavors does Farmer Bill's biltong come in?

Farmer Bill's makes four biltong flavors: Original (coriander, pepper, salt), Smokehouse (smoked paprika and onion powder), Garlic & Herb (American-grown garlic, basil, rosemary, and parsley), and Spicy Chili (made with datil pepper, a historic heirloom pepper from St. Augustine, Florida). Both slabs and sticks are available. You can see the full lineup and mix flavors in a bundle on the Mix & Match Bundles page.

Does biltong need to be refrigerated?

Yes. This is different from commercial jerky, which is designed to sit in a pantry. In South Africa, biltong is traditionally sold in paper bags that allow airflow, which prevents mold from developing. American packaging uses plastic, which traps oxygen and creates mold risk if the product isn't kept cold. Refrigerate your biltong when it arrives and keep it in the fridge. Don't store it in the pantry. A full storage guide is coming, but the short answer is: treat it like deli meat, not like a shelf-stable snack.

Sources

  1. U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Acidified Foods (21 CFR Part 114): foods at an equilibrium pH of 4.6 or below inhibit Clostridium botulinum. View ↩
  2. Tornberg, E. (2005). Effects of heat on meat proteins: implications on structure and quality of meat products. Meat Science, 70(3), 493-508. View ↩
  3. Daley, C.A., et al. (2010). A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef. Nutrition Journal, 9:10. View ↩
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