Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Making jerky from elk burger

Art, no nitrates nor nitrates for me. That sort of misses the whole point; we agree about that.

Still researching this. Your opinion is noted and appreciated, Art, though as usual your confrontational style reduces the palatability of the message (like how I snuck a cooking reference in there?).

Your article is really talking about dehumidifying jerky. I would stick to smoking or baking ground jerky. As your article suggests 155-160 is the accepted standard to kill e coli. This is important if you use store ground meat or meat that you did not personally process. What you do not want to do is hold meat under 140 for more than the three hour guide line as this promotes bacteria growth and e coli is not the only bad germ on the block. Your article indicates that a lot of venison has a higher ecoli rate due to poor handeling by hunters. Boy do I ever dissagree with that. FDA plants can be a bad joke. Some of the nastiest places I have seen have been FDA approved. Worse yet one of the primary ways that e coli is introduced to food is by dirty hands. The more people that handle your food....The higher the risk.
You do not have to use nitrates to cure your meat. Sugar, salt and smoking are just a few of the traditional methods of curing. However the incredibly minuscule amount of nitrates that you would require for a batch of jerky if you do want to hold between 40 and 140 for more than three hours is absolutly nominal compared to the health issues associated with soda or even the hydrogenated oil in peanut butter. Basicly that's a non-issue unless you have a cancer patient or some one else with serious health issues that requires steroid and anti-biotic free flesh. In that case, don't feed them ground jerky! LOL
In short you can subscribe to the chicken liitle theory or you can use good common sense and judgement. As far as fat and moisture content consider that many sausages are hung and left until they grow mold! People have been eating meat with bacteria a lot longer than refrigeration has been around. I can't even imagine how many tons of hunters sausage Kowalski sells here in a year and trust me, there's plenty of fat in that ground meat product.

Stetson, thanks. I processed it myself and added no fat. I'm pretty picky about what goes in the grinder; just ask my dog who got to gorge on all the stuff I DIDN'T grind <g>. My shop is a regular old shop for working with metal and wood, so I can't imagine that I have an E. Coli culture going out there...

I made trial batch in the dehydrator. Ate some today-delicious! If I die, you'll know because I stopped posting, which would make Sitka happy anyway <grin>.

However, I am taking this thread, with it's differing opinions, seriously. I NEED to be able to make jerky out of burger; so then the question is how do I do it in absolute safety.

For absolute safety;
1) Use meat you grind.
2) Keep your work area and equipment clean.
3) Follow the HACCP temperature guidelines. Experiement a bit. Not all countries agree on the temp required to kill e coli. Some feel an internal temp of 70 degrees for two minutes is adequate. So again you have to use common sense based on your product and cooking method.
Finally if you want to be very safe use an appropriate amount of sodium nitrate. The amount needed for a batch of ground meat jerky is absolutly nominal. This is one of the very few times I think highly of a pre made seasoning blend like the Hi Mountain products. Excellent quality and they alredy contain the appropriate amount of nitrates.

One last little tidbit... a lot of store-bought jerky is made from ground meat too. You'll recognize the "muscle meat jerky" when you see it. The ground stuff is just totally smooth, and looks like it's been formed flat. Which it has... You do need to be careful when preparing it, though. The 160 degree oven sounds reasonable.

Stetson
"For absolute safety;"

You are a pathetic joke! Fountain of "absolute" knowledge...
art just shaking his head with pathos

If it makes you feel better Art by all means feel free to replace "absolute" with ......."To follow the FDA HACCP guidlines for safety".
After all nothing is absolute except death, taxes and realizing that your narcissism really can't be controlled with medication.

My intent is to find a safe way to make burger jerky, if such a thing is possible. To that end, Art's comments about how UNsafe it is are appreciated as caution signs at a minimum.

Everyone else's comments are very much appreciated too... I'd really like to stay away from nitrates, but, I'll give that some research too.

My kids will eat jerky like there's no tomorrow, but I'd really rather not be using up my nice round steaks on it. I have more burger than I'll be able to cram down their gullets before it freezer burns, hence my desire to find a way to jerk it safely.

"There has to be a way!" This is America, after all! :-)

Why do you grind so much? Just save your front shoulders for whole muscle jerky.

Well, I kept pretty much all possible steaks and stew chunks as, well, steaks and stew chunks.

Thing is, I killed two large elk and a decent buck this year; the elk especially just made for a lot of burger....

For anyone that has not made burger jerky and is intending to try it with Stetson's suggestions: Please save your meat.

Jerky is a dried, not cooked, product. Doing as the government says and literally cooking it at 200 degrees... or getting the internal temperature to 160... will produce an inedible, though safe, piece of trash.

For some strange reason Stetson feels compelled to give advice on a subject he clearly knows nothing about beyond what he Googled. Because he has never tried what he suggested he has nothing but a guess to go on and nothing of value to offer.

He will of course present us with his personal physician's opinion to bolster his position and "prove he is right."

Anyone that has tried to make jerky already knows what happens when it gets too hot. I tried to make jerky by the governement directives on more than one occasion and had exacting control. It sucked.
art not guessing

Wow. No idea WTF that's about but it looks like you really are off your meds. Maybe a dancing pickle will make your personal "physician" a little happier. I rather doubt they are getting enough!

I have a dehydrator that uses get this heat like 155* and a fan to warm and dehydrate the meat over time. Now that temp ironically is in bacteria killing range, so to smoke houses have heat and to properly smoke some things it requires a certain temp. As opposed to cold smoked items which are also cured with salt/nitrates.

Some low level of nitrates, salt and heat to 155 dehydrating will make absolutely fine and safe jerky. It's not all or nothing people. The small amount of nitrates aren't such an issue as compared to a commercial product or to the added hormones and drugs in commercial meat.

Link to Ground Recipe

I have used this one in the smoker...........just add a splash of 'liquid smoke' to the recipe.........if used in a dehydrator.

More ground venison recipes

I think that the [spicy sweet .........] look simple and yummy!

I roll them into 'pies' and cut them into strip after they harden.

have made huge amounts of jerky-both methods.prefer whole sliced but ground works too.
flatten a spare sausage stuffer tube to desired thickness and proceed.
mostly use the outdoor smoker sans nitrates/nitrites...

but have used liquid smoke/cures as well with good results and drying on oven racks over the wood stove.

lots of fat bellies and no deaths/sickness to date.

just use proper precautions when dealing with raw meat.

Now that's a darn good idea!

I have tried both the ground and solid jerky. I used the High Mountain stuff,but still never liked it. I went back to buying it at Sam's Club in bulk, and using the meat in differnt ways

Jeff, I would not worry about using up the ground meat. It will keep in the feezer. Especially since you added no fat. You might have another few dry years.Having meat in the freezer is like having money in the bank.Since I zeroed out this year,my 07 elk and deer will strecth out to 09 with the deer I got this year to supplement it.

Start making more tacos, chili, spaghetti sauces. Used those front shoulders for roast next time and start using a crock pot.

No fat added hamburgers cooked on the grill are about as good as steak.

Cornell University conducted a study which basically states that feeding cattle in feedlots huge amounts of corn, results in e coli that is resistant to human stomach acid. Simply changing the beef diet to grass, greatly reduced the risk of the e coli to humans.

I process a lot of ground venison jerky and have never had an issue. Nor do I anticipate having one. YMMV and life is full of risks, I just don't think this is one that concerns me.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept98/acid.relief.hrs.html

From the Cornell article;

"When meat is contaminated with cattle feces at slaughter or fruit and vegetables are fertilized with manure, E. coli O157:H7 can enter the human food supply. In day-care facilities and nursing homes, fecal contamination is the vehicle for person-to-person infection"

Bottom line is keep your feces and your food seperate. A bit disgusting but true. Same applies to consuming non-pasteurized apple juice or cider. If the apples used in the juice were those collected from the ground.... deer like apples, deer poo in the orchard and there have been out breaks attributed to that. Unfortunatly I suspect many of us know what migrant workers and illigals are doing in those vegetable fields and the near by watering ditches.
The risk is minimal in most venison since we should all have intimate knowledge of exactly how that flesh was handled assuming you didn't take it in for processing. That could be another whole thread. Many game processers here don't even give you back your own venison. They go strictly by weight. If you can process your own meat your light years ahead in food safety IMO.