In our ever growing search for great food finds we stumbled across Krave Jerky – a gourmet jerky from the lovely confines of Sonoma, California.

Jerky? What’s wrong with the stuff at gas stations?

This isn’t your uncle Buck’s jerky from the gas stop ‘down-the-way;’ filled with questionable ingredients, and even more questionable meat ‘products’ in them. Krave is strictly gourmet – great slabs of meat and the best ingredients. The slices are not that “shredded and processed type”, these are real cuts of great beef, pork, and turkey. You are getting a slab off the slicer and dried. So delicious are the flavors that we have a hard time not blowing through the whole bag in one sitting. We carry all seven flavors – from Turkey Lemon Garlic to Beef Curry, there is a flavor for all your taste buds.

Who makes it?

The great folks at Krave – with their hearts buried deep in gourmet they bring everything we could ever want out of dried meat. Jonathan, founder and maker of jerky, has been a runner for most of his life. After trying shakes, bars, and powders alike for protein struggling to find the right pre- and post-run food. “After about a year or so [he] came to realize that while there is a huge supply of ‘junk jerky’ on the market” that there wasn’t much of “any gourmet jerky with interesting flavors.” So like any smart thinking runner go-getter would do he did something about it. He “set out to develop an array of jerky products that [are] gourmet in nature (meaning soft, moist, with domestic beef) and launched it… in January.” Dedication to the jerky proved to be just the right thing. It’s all hand processed, no machine cuts or forms – the meat is dehydrated within the marinade, keeping their jerky rich and moist.

Gourmet Jerky, that sounds too fancy to munch on.

Trust us, you’ll want to munch – if it lasts that long. Not only are the bags the perfect size for gorging oneself on desiccated meats but enough to share. What is great is this jerky lends it self to be dressed up for black tie galas or way down for sweatpants and a night in front of the television. The other great part about Krave is that their Jerky contains half of the sodium content of most other jerky. Gourmet might have the stigma of being overly fancy, but trust us when we say you’ll want to take a bag with you wherever you go.

Where can I get it?

In the entire state of Illinois, Southport Grocery and Cafe is the only place that carries this lip-smackingly good treat. We’ve got all their flavors but have a hard time keeping it on our shelves – so if you are looking for a flavor we don’t currently have, let us know and we’ll get it!