Spicy, mild, sweet, no sodium — choose your favorites, and take advantage of these easy-to-follow guidelines on how to make venison jerky.
Making Your Own Jerky
One of the greatest things about making jerky is you can make it any way you like — any flavor or thickness, with any cut of meat.
Homemade jerky is fun and easy to make. It’s flavorful, easy to chew and a treat for everyone in the family. And it’s free of chemical preservatives (other than salt) when you make it yourself.
There’s a lot you can do with jerky made from the flavorful recipes here. And there’s much more to jerky than the traditional thin, rock-hard style. You can use it for:
- snacks
- trail food
- lunch-pail additions
- garnishes for salads
- cocktail party hors d’oeuvres
- emergency food
- flavoring for vegetable hot dishes
Much of that variety can be produced through various recipes and smoking methods, plus some experimentation to find your preferences. And you can produce more variety simply by making jerky in various thicknesses.
After much experimentation, most of it highly enjoyable and tasty, we’ve assembled several recipes, comments and tips for making great jerky. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
Three Types of Jerky
Forever jerky is the traditional jerky — thin and hard, and lasts almost forever unless it’s eaten first, but flavorful and not so hard that it defies biting, chewing or tearing. Dried, it’s 1/8- to 3/4-inch thick, 3/4 to 1½ inches wide, and 4 to 8 inches long. Forever jerky is an excellent trail food, camp snack, canoe trip snack and between-meals snack at home. It’s great anywhere you want a light, quick, nonspoiling source of nutrition.
Week-and-a-half jerky is a bit thicker — maybe 1/4- to 3/8-inch thick, 3/4 to 1½ inches wide and 2 to 5 inches long when dry. It keeps well in the refrigerator. It isn’t as hard as forever jerky. Children like it much better simply because it’s easier to chew and is usually cut in smaller pieces.
Gone-by-tomorrow jerky is generally 3/8- to 1/2-inch thick, 1/2- to 1-inch wide and 1½ to 4 inches long when dried. It can be moist and slightly red (dried red, not raw red) in the middle, and chewy to tender depending on the cut of meat used and drying time. For easy snacking and cocktail party hors d’oeuvres, cut the finished jerky into bite-size pieces. Children also like this type of jerky in their lunches.
When you make this jerky, cut it after curing. You’ll find it’s much easier to work with longer strips of meat during the preparation and smoking stages.
Preferred Meat
Neck roasts, leg roasts, and round and flank meat work well. It isn’t necessary to use more-tender cuts of meat.
Trim away all fat. Also trim away all connective tissue and muscle sheathing, or as much as can be practically trimmed. Fat, connective tissue and muscle sheathing on wild game can cause an unwanted wild or strong flavor. Fat on wild-game meat can be particularly strong and turns rancid easily.
A sharp knife is invaluable when you’re butchering meat, but especially so when working with these small, sometimes tough and sometimes hard-to-handle pieces of meat. Keep a good steel (harder than the steel in your knife). That comment is no joke, because some steels are fairly soft. A fine stone is handy, too.
Best Ways to Cut Meat
• Forever jerky: Cut meat with the grain for long strips that won’t crumble. Or cut the meat across the grain so it crumbles easily later for use as salad garnish, in scrambled eggs or as flavoring in a vegetable hot dish.
To allow easy, consistent cutting across the grain, freeze the meat for one to two hours or until it’s firm but not solid. It’s firm enough when ice crystals begin to form.
• Week-and-a-half jerky: Try to go with the grain, but that isn’t absolutely necessary because of increased thickness of the meat. For variety, cut meat quartering across the grain.
• Gone-by-tomorrow jerky: This can be cut from any meat. It’s not necessary to pay attention to the direction of the meat grain because of the thickness and quality of the pieces.
A note on shrinkage: Generally, it will be about 20%, depending on the drying time and heat level. There’s less shrinkage with Gone-by-tomorrow jerky.
Smoking and Drying
Oven method: You can go three ways:
- Place the meat on two small baking cooling racks, and then place those racks on the oven rack.
- Place meat directly on the oven rack.
- Skewer meat strips on a toothpick, one piece per toothpick, and place the toothpicks across the bars so the meat strips hang down.
The first method seemed to be the easiest and neatest. You can fill two small cooling racks with meat — with the meat strips placed on the racks so they barely touch but do not overlap — at a table or counter, and then place them on the oven rack. When the meat is done, the racks lift out easily. The oven rack remains clean. You’ll only have to clean the two small racks holding the meat. Also, the cooling racks have less space between the wires, so you can place smaller pieces of meat on them without the meat falling through.
READ: OVERNIGHT DEER JERKY RECIPE WITH TABASCO SAUCE
Place the cooling racks side by side. Don’t overlap them, because meat on the bottom layer remains moist when overlapped. Set the oven temperature for 170 to 200 degrees, although 200 is generally on the high side. The meat should dry in about four hours. Begin checking it after three hours.
With a gas oven, begin checking at three hours of drying time. Four to six hours should be plenty of time to dry the meat to your preferred dryness.
A gas oven works well for finishing meat no matter whether the basic drying was done in a smoker, electric oven or gas oven. You can put the meat in a gas oven with only the pilot light producing heat and leave it overnight. Take the meat out of the oven when you get up the next morning, and it should be perfect.
Smoker Method
This generally takes six to eight hours. After three hours, begin rotating the racks for the most even drying of meat. Keep checking the meat every hour or so until it reaches the desired dryness.
Dehydrator Method
Use any of these recipes, including liquid smoke. Place the meat on the dehydrator racks. As a drying guideline, our 10-rack dehydrator set at 140 degrees dries meat in 12 to 16 hours, depending upon the meat thickness.
Here’s a major plus for dehydrators: You can mix the types of food being dried at any time, such as meat and two or three kinds of fruit. The flavors will not mix.
Microwave Method
People using microwaves to make jerky have experienced mixed results, including us. Wattages vary tremendously from microwave to microwave, so we hesitate to give specific suggestions. Experiment with the heat level and length of time to find the most flavorful results.
