Jerky basics, part two

Let’s dehydrate some beef, shall we?

(Go back to Part One)

This is the second part of a two-part series on making beef jerky with a dehydrator. Here’s a link to part one if you came directly here.

We’ve discussed the definition of jerky, said a little about cures, and given you the suggestion of what type of dehydrator to use. Now, we can look at actual jerky making.

The first decision that must be made is whether you want to make sliced, a/k/a whole muscle, jerky, or ground meat jerky. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. I like both; I make both. Let’s take a look at them.

Ground meat jerky comes together more quickly than sliced jerky, because sliced jerky has to marinate for a day or two, while ground meat can simply be mixed with seasonings. (Some recipes call for resting the mixture in the fridge to allow the spices to mingle and rehydrate, but quite frankly I usually put it right into the dehydrator.)

Ground meat jerky, especially if shaped with something like a jerky gun (we mentioned those in Part One), is very consistent in size and shape, and so it’s easy to divide up into individual servings. The meat for whole muscle jerky is usually sliced from a roast, and even if you’re careful to slice it to a uniform thickness, some of the pieces will be shaped differently than others just from the grain of the meat and the shape of the roast. And unless you use special guides (such as a recessed jerky cutting board), it’s likely that your slices of whole muscle meat will be thicker and will take longer to dry than extruded strips of ground meat.

Whole muscle jerky, depending on the cut of meat and how dry you get it, can be quite a bit harder to chew than ground meat jerky. But whole muscle jerky is perhaps a more traditional experience.

Whole muscle jerky is usually cured by marinade — and that makes it easy for you to customize and experiment with flavors.

Ground meat jerky is cured with a dry seasoning. (Sometimes, small amounts of liquid or moist ingredients can be added, such as liquid smoke, hot sauce or even a shot of whiskey.) As I discussed in Part One, when I make ground meat jerky I usually do it with a nitrite cure. Often, that means buying a commercially-available jerky seasoning, almost all of which include nitrite. If I do try to improvise my own ground meat seasoning, I add a little bit of Prague Powder #1, a nitrite-based cure, strictly following the package directions for how much to add per pound of meat.

In many cases, your dehydrator may come with a sample of jerky seasoning, and the instructions are usually for ground meat, so maybe that’s a good reason to start out with a batch of ground meat jerky.

Ground meat jerky

For any kind of jerky, you want to use the leanest meat you can find. In a good steak or a good burger, fat is part of the expected flavor. But for jerky, it’s not. You want the flavor from the beef and from the seasonings that soak into it. And fat goes rancid, causing your jerky to spoil more quickly.

Some stores carry the “Laura’s Lean Beef” brand of ground meat, which comes in two varieties: 8 percent fat and 4 percent fat. Buy the 4 percent fat if you can find it. The lean ground beef is expensive, but my Kroger sometimes gives me personalized coupons for it or has it on sale, and that’s sometimes a sign that it’s time to make some jerky.

I highly recommend Hi Mountain Seasonings jerky kits. I have tried many others, but I keep coming back to Hi Mountain. They have a variety of different flavors. The seasoning and the cure are in different packages but you get an empty shaker bottle to mix them in before adding them to the meat. The instructions tell you how much to use depending on how many pounds of beef you are using.

The dry seasonings can also be used with sliced meat, but we’ll get to that.

Commercial seasonings generally come in a two-part package. The seasonings are kept separate from the curing powder until you are ready to use them. You mix them together and then work them thoroughly into the meat, using clean or gloved hands. Mix, mix, mix. TV chefs will tell you not to overwork ground meat when you are making burgers or meatloaf, because it will lead to the meat drying out. Obviously, that’s not a concern for us — we’re planning to dry the meat!

It’s vital that the seasonings and especially the cure be evenly distributed. You don’t want one piece of jerky that’s overseasoned and overcured and another piece that’s underseasoned and undercured. Mix, mix, mix. Often, the nitrite cure will begin subtly changing the color of the meat as you mix it in, which makes it easier to tell whether it’s been properly mixed. You want the color to be uniform.

Some jerky seasonings will tell you to add a little bit of ice water with the seasoning mix. I assume this is to help rehydrate and wake up some of the seasonings and help them distribute properly. Weirdly enough, I think the added moisture sometimes makes a difference in the texture and thickness of the finished jerky, and I’m not sure I like it. Follow the directions first time around, but if you don’t like the result try it without the water the next time and see if that makes a difference.

In Part One, I recommended the use of a jerky gun for shaping ground meat jerky. If you don’t have one, put some of your seasoned ground beef between two sheets of wax paper and use a rolling pin to roll it out as thinly as possible. Use a knife or a pizza cutter to cut it into strips and then carefully transfer the meat strips (without the wax paper) to the trays of your dehydrator.

If you have the jerky gun, simply fill it and use it to extrude strips of jerky directly onto a tray.

You should probably set the dehyrator to its highest heat setting. Actual dehydration time will depend on your dehydrator, the thickness of the jerky, the humidity, and whether you’ve added any wet ingredients. The jerky should be firm, not mushy or soft, but it should not be rock hard. It should be flexible and chewy.

Whole muscle jerky

As with ground meat jerky, you want whole muscle jerky to be as lean as possible. The main thing to avoid here is marbling. Exterior fat, even big chunks of it, can be trimmed off as long as the meat itself is fairly lean.

Meat for jerky is traditionally sliced with the grain, which gives the chewy texture some people love. But some people like the softer chew of jerky cut across the grain, and if you are going to use jerky as an ingredient for cooking (such as on a camping trip, where it’s sometimes rehydrated into stews or what have you), you should probably cut it across the grain. Keep this in mind as you look for a roast. Which way is the grain running? Which direction would you need to slice the roast, and what size and shape pieces will that give you?

By the way, while jerky is traditionally made as strips, it’s possible to marinate small cubes of meat and dry them as jerky nuggets. You don’t want them too big; you want the marinade to be able to penetrate them, and you want the moisture to be able to get out. I wouldn’t go much larger than a half-inch cube.

It’s important to slice meat as consistently as possible; if some slices are thicker than others, you may have to pull some pieces out of the dehydrator while others aren’t quite done yet. A quarter-inch thickness is ideal. There are special jerky cutting boards you can buy to facilitate this. The piece of meat sits in the center of the board, and there’s a 1/4-inch raised rim or railing around the edge. By resting the side of your your knife on the rim and cutting sideways, you can cut a neat 1/4-inch slice off the bottom of the roast. Hi Mountain and Cabela’s both have versions of this product.

After you have sliced the jerky, it will need to marinate for 24–48 hours in the refrigerator. I put the beef and the marinade in a gallon-sized zip-top bag. Be sure and massage the bag when you first seal it up, and occasionally afterward, to make sure none of the slices are sticking together and keeping the marinade from getting between them. You may want to put the bag in a bowl or baking dish in case of leaks.

TV (and now web) host Alton Brown has an excellent basic recipe for a jerky marinade. It involves equal parts soy sauce and Worcestershire, along with honey, liquid smoke, onion powder, red pepper flakes and black pepper. Basically, you want your marinade to include salt (provided, in this case, by the soy sauce, and to a lesser extent by the Worcestershire), sugar (honey) and acid (the Worcestershire, which is vinegar-based). With this recipe as a base, you can easily experiment with the seasonings and flavors to your liking.

Keith Rainville of Fat Yankee Jerky has some excellent jerky recipes, from General Tso’s Jerky to Tennessee Whiskey Jerky, in a cookbook and actually sells an online course on his website for those who want to sell their jerky commercially like he does. He has a number of recipes on YouTube as well. Here he is with a recipe for Orange Habanero Jerky:

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Sliced jerky can also be dry-marinated using commercial jerky seasonings. I mentioned Hi Mountain jerky seasonings when I wrote about ground meat jerky, and their dry seasonings also include directions for use with sliced meat. Basically, you coat the meat liberally with the specified quantity of seasoning/cure mixture, so that each individual slice is well-coated, then pack all of the slices together as closely as possible into a big mass and bundle it up tightly with plastic wrap, trying to squeeze out any air bubbles. (You could also put the mass into a vacuum sealer bag.) Again, it needs to sit in the fridge long enough for the seasonings and cure to penetrate the meat.

Once again, you want to put whole muscle jerky into the dehydrator, on the highest heat setting, and dry it until it is firm but still chewy and pliable.

Storing your jerky

Once your jerky comes out of the dehydrator, with the consistency you like, check to see if there’s any grease beading up on the outside (a sign that your beef wasn’t as lean as you thought). If so, blot it off with paper towels right away, while it is still warm. Allow the jerky to cool completely before sealing it up in an air-tight container. While the jerky is still warm, it gives off steam, and if you try to seal it up too quickly, that steam will condense on the walls of the bag or plastic container.

I spent 35 years at my local small-town newspaper, working in a newsroom with good friends. When I would make a batch of jerky, I would bring it to work and share it with friends, and it would only last a day or two.

In 2020, I took a job with county government. I work with some great folks, but I have my own office, and while we have a break room not everyone goes there on a daily basis and there’s not really a central place for me to leave a big bowl of jerky. I will share a few pieces with one co-worker who I know likes jerky, but that’s it.

I remember the first time after the change that I made a big batch of ground meat jerky (I usually make two pounds of beef into jerky at one time) and didn’t finish it right away. One day, I noticed some mold on it. I have since learned to divide a two-pound batch up into three zip-top plastic bags and throw two of them into the freezer. Mold seems to be more of a problem with the ground meat jerky than with whole muscle jerky, and it’s also dependent on how dry you actually get the jerky.

So, there are my ramblings about making jerky. I don’t claim to be an expert, and there are some fine cookbooks and online sources that you can turn to for further information, but maybe I’ve helped motivate you to try a batch.

And don’t forget to use your dehydrator for other things as well! When I need half an onion for a recipe, I will sometimes slice up the other half and throw it into the dehydrator. You can turn your favorite fruit into fruit leather (the homemade version of Fruit Roll-Ups) and dry it in your dehydrator. Just puree your favorite fruit with an equal amount of unsweetened applesauce, which provides pectin and ensures the proper texture. The dehydration will concentrate the flavor and the fruit leather will taste like your featured fruit, not like applesauce.

Line the trays of your dehydrator with cooking parchment (some dehydrators also have “fruit roll liners” especially designed to fit on their trays) and pour out a layer of the puree on the parchment. Dry at a lower temperature than you would use for beef jerky. If you’re using parchment, you can just roll up the finished leather on the parchment for storage and peel it off when you get ready to enjoy it!