There are many ways to make venison jerky. The smoker method generally takes six to eight hours. After three hours, you rotate the racks for the most even drying of meat. Keep checking the meat every hour or so until it reaches the desired dryness. Here are tips for smoking venison jerky before, during and after smoking.

Before Smoking: Tips and Comments

• Men generally prefer spicy or mild jerky flavor.
• Women and children generally prefer mild or sweet flavor.
• When you use a smoker, eliminate liquid smoke from any recipe.
• If you use an oven, include liquid smoke when specified in the recipe.
• Monosodium glutamate, such as Accent, is a flavor enhancer, not a meat tenderizer.
• Meat tenderizers break down the meat structure and make it a bit mushy on the surface. We tested some recipes with meat tenderizer but did not like them.
• When we replaced meat tenderizer with a meat flavor enhancer, the recipe and finished jerky were fine.
• Spray racks with aerosol salad oil. The rack will then be easy to clean.
• Place a cookie sheet on the bottom rack of the oven or smoker to catch meat drippings. If you forget this, you’ll be amazed at the burnt-offering scents produced (especially by your oven) the next time you use it.
• Modern recipes require less salt than old-time recipes because refrigeration has assumed some of the preservation duties salt used to perform. So if you have older recipes, don’t compare them to these.

During Smoking: Tips and Comments

• Follow the directions that come with the smoker for the best length of drying time. Each smoker has a specific setting the manufacturer will have tested.
• In the smoker, use one or more pans of chips, depending on how mild or strong a smoke flavor you want.
• Change rack positions — top to bottom, bottom to middle, middle to top — at regular intervals during the drying process so meat dries evenly and is done at about the same time. Heat varies from the top to the bottom of the smoker, which necessitates changing the rack position. You will not need to turn the meat on each rack.
• High humidity, cold weather, rainy weather and possibly even altitude will affect drying time in a smoker. Experiment to determine the variables with your smoker.
• When using a smoker in humid, wet weather, if moisture does not escape fast enough, the meat will cook instead of dry out. You will get better jerky by waiting until the weather improves.

After Smoking: Tips and Comments

• Generally, store jerky in a cool airtight container, such as a peanut butter jar with a screw-on lid, because the jerky has no preservative other than salt.
• The safest storage is in your refrigerator. This is especially true for thicker jerky pieces, which might not have all moisture removed.
• Jerky can also be stored in a plastic self-sealing bag or plastic bag closed with a wire twister.
• We don’t know the shelf life of jerky because we’ve never had any last long enough to go bad. It seems reasonable to expect, though, that it will lose flavor after about six months.
• Experiment with the oven, smoker, herbs, spices, sweetness, spirits, various recipes, degrees of heat, dryness of meat, thickness of meat, kinds of wood chips, different amounts of ingredients in each recipe and other items. Most of all, have fun.
• Jerky should not be crisp. If it is, your oven temperature was too high.
• Some jerky tasted best right off the smoking rack, but jerky from other recipes tasted best a couple of days after smoking. That’s possibly because some seasonings take longer to produce their best flavor.