Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Jerky

Counting today's batch I have made 23 3/4 pounds of finished venison jerky. Season still has 73 days to go. At this rate I expect to finish 150 pounds this season. Life is good.

Nowhere near your league, but I've got 3.5 lbs of raw meat seasoning in the fridge right now, using up a roast from 2005 I found when cleaning out the freezer the night before. Other than one silver dollar sized piece of freezer burn, meat looks as good now as the day it was frozen.

damn near 24 pounds finished? i need a bigger smoker to compete with that.....DAY-UM!

dont have the time to sit and do the lil batches at a time in mine.....need something where i can do most of an entire deers worth at once....

Assuming you can't eat that much jerky very fast, how do you preserve/store it? In the freezer?

For you fellas that smoke your jerky, what temp do you aim for at the rack? I use a dehydrator, but next batch think I'll fire up the smokehouse.

havent actually tried in my smoker yet, mostly cause i cant control the temps that close...its good for doing big chunks of meat but havent had much luck with much else so far....need to upgrade....

First off I only use hams to do jerky. It leaves the house as fast as I can make it. Both sons + families, daughter, granddaughter, three hunt clubs and a wife who get hers off the top. What I have left over is vacuum packed with a Food Saver Pro and freeze. I rarely have any left come Mid-January. I have also experimented with packing in salt barrels. That works real well. Being that the venison is already jerked it doesn't take on any more salt just drys some more.
I'm running up to 50 trays on Nasco dehydrators, an 8 tray, a 12 tray and a 30 tray unit. I have put out 38 10oz bags in the last ten days. Four batches 9, 11, 10, and 8 today. I run 15-20lbs wet every three days. I'll get 40oz from 105oz wet so I get about 12 bags from a 20lbs batch give or take.

As for temp so long as you can get it up to 155-160 for four hours you are good to go if you use a cure. If you don't use a cure then you have to cook it to at least 200 for 1 hour. I don't like the taste of cooked jerky if I want smoke I'll add a liquid or powdered product and bet you can't tell the difference.

thats my problem.....gotta figure out how to lower the temps without going to far.....

Cannot agree with the liquid smoke... It gags me. I have never seen a powdered product.

Just did two batches of moose that totaled about 35# starting. I start by smoking them for about an hour, very cool temps and then put them in the oven at 170 with the door cracked open. I ran the second batch through a dehydrator instead of the oven and it was not as good, texture-wise, to my taste.

If the meat is kept cold until smoking and not allowed to sit there is no point in cooking it and I do not use cures.
art