Although sun-drying is a time-honored method, it is only suggested for very lean cattle, young lamb, or venison when making jerky. Sun-drying fish is likewise not suggested unless it is severely salted. When producing jerky from any type of fowl, avoid this approach entirely. You must reside in an arid, hot, sunny environment with adequate breezes to successfully sun-dry foods. The risk of getting food illness isn’t worth it.
When drying beef jerky in the sun, how long does it take?
Place the beef slices on a drying rack and hang it for one day in direct sunlight. If drying the beef in the oven, place the slices on a baking dish and bake for 4.5 hours at 185 F or 85 C. Whichever method you choose, make sure each piece of beef is not on top of another one.
What’s the best way to remove moisture from jerky?
The introduction of moisture in a sealed environment for an extended period of time is a second way of rehydrating jerky. This approach takes a little longer than the microwave method, but the end result is usually superior. This strategy is a fantastic place to start if you have the time.
Brush the Jerky with a Liquid
Allow the jerky to remain in a sealed setting for a few hours or up to 24 hours after lightly brushing it with a liquid. Any liquid will suffice. Soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, vegetable, beef, or chicken broth, liquid smoke, and water are all excellent additions. We suggest using the same liquid that was used in the original recipe.
If you leave the jerky out too long, it will become mushy. For all choices, we recommend keeping the jerky in the refrigerator to avoid excessive moisture transfer and possibly mold.
Seal the Jerky with White Bread, Moist Vegetable, or Wet Towel
An alternate way to attempt is to enclose the beef jerky in an airtight container with a piece of bread, moist vegetable (carrot, celery, or potato), or a damp towel if you have some patience. Over the course of 24 hours, the jerky will slowly pick-up the moisture in the container. Depending on the dryness of the jerky, this process can be hit or miss, but it’s a solid alternative to try as a first step.
In the sun, how do you dehydrate meat?
Richard, you’ve posed an excellent question. Meat preservation is a skill that falls within what I refer to as the Bushcraft world. These are long-term talents that go beyond simply survival when it comes to living with the land. To answer your question, it depends entirely on where you reside and how humid the environment is.
We had to build a crude smokeshack where I grew up in the Great Lakes to smoke and dry the meat over a three-to-four-day period, just like the pioneers did. Because of the extreme humidity, drying clothes on an exposed rack was nearly impossible.
Making jerky is a caveman’s task in the parched Southwest, where I now reside. We cut the meat (deer, squirrel, or store-bought beef) into 1/8-inch or thinner strips, season it with spices or hot sauce, and dry it in the sun for eight to sixteen hours, and voila-the greatest jerky you’ll ever taste.
What’s my go-to “marinade?” Before hanging the batch on the drying racks, soak it in a mixture of barbecue sauce and honey. If I’m going all out, I’ll just throw the meat on the rack without the marinade. Fat must be removed so that it does not grow rancid later.
In May, I attempted this procedure with a group of people on a desert survival training, and our meat strips were dry and brittle in just six hours! Making jerky serves as a wonderful reminder of why, even in the desert, you must stay hydrated. The best way to tell if your jerky is done is to break a piece in half crisply.
Indigenous civilizations all around the world trim their meat strips to 1/8 thickness or less to prevent flies from depositing their eggs in the meat and to speed up the drying process.
So, I’d suggest looking at your region’s archeological record to see what tactics the indigenous used. It’ll either be a smokeshack of some sort or air drying on open racks. Experiment with several store lean beef cuts to determine what works best in your area.
How long does beef jerky take to dry?
Place the beef in the freezer for one to two hours, depending on how much fat you want to remove. Cut it into 3/8 to 1/4 inch thick strips once it’s semi-frozen. (To save time, have a butcher slice it very thin for you at the grocery store meat counter.) This eliminates the requirement for the meat to be frozen before slicing.) Keep in mind that meat cut against the grain is supple and easy to break, but meat cut against the grain is chewy.
To make the marinade, combine the remaining ingredients in a basin. Pour the marinade over the meat in a glass container. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour after covering (I have had great success with leaving it overnight.)
Place the meat on dehydrator trays after draining it in a strainer. While drying, do not overlap the meat and turn it once. Dry for 8 to 10 hours at 145F. After 4 hours, I start checking on the development. When it bends like a willow without breaking, it’s ready. Store in ziploc bags or Mason jars in the refrigerator.
In the sun, how do you cure meat?
The simplest approach to preserve meat in the wild is to just dry it out with the sun’s heat. Simply chop the meat into tiny strips to ensure that it dries out as rapidly as possible. It will take significantly longer for thicker slices of beef to dry out.
If you want to dry your meat in the sun, make sure you have everything set up in an open area with nothing blocking the sun. After I’ve found the ideal spot for drying my meat, I create a rack (usually out of wood) to hang my thin strips of meat to dry.
What method did the Cowboys use to create jerky?
Beef jerky was produced by chopping cow meat into thin strips by cowboys. While flank steak is the most common cut of beef used in commercially produced jerky today, cowboys in the 1800s were significantly less picky about the cut of meat they used. They ate anything that was edible.
When you dry jerky, what temperature do you use?
Pathogenic bacteria are likely to withstand the dry heat of a warm oven and especially the 130 to 140 F of a food dehydrator when raw meat or chicken is dehydrated at home – either in a heated oven or a food dehydrator – to make jerky that will be stored on the shelf. The scientific underpinning for drying food to make it safe is included, as well as the safest method for preparing homemade jerky.
What is jerky?
This is a nutrient-dense beef that has been dried to make it lighter. After being converted into jerky, a pound of beef or chicken weighs around four ounces. It is shelf stable, meaning it can be stored without refrigeration, making it a useful food for travelers and anyone who do not have access to refrigerators.
Jerky has been around since at least ancient Egypt. Animal meat that was too large to eat all at once, such as bear, buffalo, and orwhales, was used to make jerky. To produce pemmican, North American Indians blended crushed dried meat with dried fruit or suet. Biltong is a type of dried meat or game that is popular in many African countries. The name jerky comes from the Spanish word charque, which means “to chew.”
How can drying meat make it safe?
The oldest and most prevalent method of food preservation is drying. Canning technology is less than 200 years old, and freezing became practicable only throughout this century as people’s access to electricity increased. The majority of the world’s civilization has access to simple drying technology.
The scientific principle behind food preservation by drying is that when moisture is removed from the food, enzymes are unable to effectively interact or react with it. Preventing bacterial, fungal, or naturally occurring autolytic enzymes from raw food preserves the food from biological action.
What are the types of food drying?
Food drying comes in a variety of forms. In the open air, two forms of natural drying occur: sundrying and adibatic (shadow) drying. Adibatic drying takes place without the use of heat. Solar drying is often done in a specific container that traps the sun’s heat. Fruits including apricots, tomatoes, and grapes are commonly dried in this manner (to make raisins). Because of the lack of a consistent heat source and the risk of contamination from animals, insects, dust, and bacteria, sun drying is not advised for manufacturing meat jerky.
Food can be dried using an artificial heat source such as a heated oven or a food dehydrator. The following are the major components of an electric food dehydrator:
- a heating source;
- To circulate the dry air, there must be an air movement.
- trays to hold the food while it is drying; and
- To dry specific types of foods, use mesh or leather sheets.
Why is temperature important when making jerky?
Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to homemade jerky raise concerns about the safety of traditional beef and venison jerky drying processes. The current USDA Meat and Fowl Hotlines advice for properly manufacturing jerky is to cook meat to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and poultry to 165 degrees Fahrenheit before dehydrating. Any germs present will be killed by the moist heat in this stage. However, most dehydrator instructions do not mention this step, and a dehydrator may not be able to achieve temperatures high enough to cook meat to 160 degrees Fahrenheit or 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
Maintaining a steady dehydrator temperature of 130 to 140 F during the drying process is critical after heating to 160 F or 165 F.
- The drying process must be quick enough to prevent food from spoiling; and
- It must remove enough water to prevent bacteria from growing.
Why is it a food safety concern to dry meat without first heating it to 160 F?
The problem of dehydrating meat and poultry without first heating it to a safe temperature is that the device will not heat the meat to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, which kills bacteria, before it dries. Bacteria become significantly more heat resistant after drying.
Evaporating moisture absorbs the majority of the heat in a dehydrator or low-temperature oven. As a result, the temperature of the meat does not begin to rise until the majority of the moisture has evaporated. As a result, when the temperature of the dried meat finally rises, the bacteria are more heat resistant and more likely to survive. If the germs that survive are pathogenic, those who eat the jerky could get sick from it.
What research findings exist on the safety of jerky?
Journal of Food Protection, Vol. 67, No. 10, 2004, Pages 23372341, published Effects of Preparation Methods on the Microbiological Safety of Home-DriedMeat Jerky. The authors are from the University of Georgia (Brian A. Nummer, Judy A. Harrison, and Elizabeth L. Andress, Department of Foods and Nutrition, and Mark A. Harrison, Department of Food Science and Technology) and Colorado State University (Brian A. Nummer, Judy A. Harrison, and Elizabeth L. Andress, Department of Food Science and Technology) (Patricia Kendall, Departmentof Food Science and Human Nutrition and John N. Sofos, Department ofAnimal Sciences ).
Marinating meat does not make it safe to eat raw meat. The study revealed that marinating alone did not result in a substantial reduction of the pathogen when compared to entire beef slices that were not marinated.
In the jerky experiments, some samples exhibited complete bacterial eradication while others showed considerable bacterial persistence, particularly ground beef jerky. Pathogenic E. coli might survive drying intervals of up to 10 hours and temperatures of up to 145 degrees Fahrenheit, according to additional trials with lab-inoculated venison.
The Harrisons and Ruth Ann Rose, also of the University of Georgia, published a paper in the Journal of Food Protection, Vol. 61, No. 1, in January 1998. The authors compared ground beef jerky with and without a curing solution comprising salt and sodium nitrite produced with a commercial beef jerky spice blend.
Before creating jerky strips and dehydrating it, half of the ground beef was contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. The authors discovered that jerky manufactured with the curing mix destroyed more bacteria than jerky made without it in both heated and unheated samples. The jerky that was produced with the mixture and heated before dehydrating had the highest rate of bacteria destruction.
They concluded that precooking ground beef jerky to 160 degrees Fahrenheit prior to drying reduces the risk of E. coli O157:H7 contamination.
What are the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotlines recommendations for making homemade jerky?
The findings of the research back up what the Hotline has been advising callers. Safe handling and preparation practices must also be employed at all times, including:
- Before and after working with meat products, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water.
- Use sanitary utensils and equipment.
- Use or freeze ground beef and chicken within 2 days; whole red meats within 3 to 5 days; keep meat and poultry refrigerated at 40 F or slightly below.
- Frozen meat should be defrosted in the refrigerator rather than on the kitchen counter.
- Refrigerate the meat to marinate. Don’t preserve the marinade for later use. Before dehydrating the jerky, marinades are employed to tenderize and flavor it.
- Before drying meat or poultry, steam or roast it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, as measured using a meatthermometer.
- Dry meats in a food dehydrator with an adjustable temperature control that keeps the temperature between 130 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit during the drying process.
Are there special considerations for wild game jerky?
When creating homemade jerky from deer or other wild animal, there are a few things to keep in mind. Venison can be extensively contaminated with fecal bacteria, according to Keene and his co-authors, with the degree variable according on the hunters ability, wound location, and other factors. While fresh beef is typically cooled quickly, deer carcasses are typically kept at room temperature, which could allow bacteria to multiply.
Is commercially made jerky safe?
Yes, inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service oversee the procedure in federally inspected factories. Products can be smoked or unsmoked, air or oven dried, and cured or uncured. On processed jerky goods, the following terms may appear:
- A single chunk of beef is used to make beef jerky.
- Chunked and Moulded Beef Jerky is made from meat chunks that are molded and formed before being cut into strips.
- Ground and Formed or Chopped and Formed Beef Jerky is made from ground or chopped beef that has been molded and cut into strips. Beef Jerky with binders or extenders must be labeled with the real product name (e.g.,Beef and Soy Protein Concentrate Jerky, Ground and Formed).
- Jerky Sausage by Species (or Kind) – the product has been cut and may be dried at any step of the process before being filled into casings.
Why did my handmade jerky turn out to be moldy?
There’s nothing quite like cooking your own jerky. Jerky of all kinds is a favorite of ours.
Our products are used by a large majority of our consumers here, and
their meat is jerky Finding mold on your jerky, on the other hand, is a bummer. We frequently
I get a lot of queries about mold in jerky and how to avoid it.
To begin with, mold in jerky can be generated by a variety of circ*mstances, but the most common culprits include
Moisture and oxygen are always present. They will, in the end, contribute to bacterial growth.
Your jerky will rot as a result of this growth.
If there isn’t enough moisture removed from the jerky, it will mold.
During the drying process, the meat should retain about 90% to 95% of its moisture; as a result, it should have roughly 90% to 95% of its original moisture.
During the drying process, the moisture in the meat is eliminated. If
If it doesn’t, mold spores will proliferate due to the moisture remaining in the meat. If
Because the jerky is almost totally dried, mold is unlikely to grow.
When it comes to jerky, we’re frequently questioned whether to use a desiccant or an oxygen absorber.
Because the amount of wetness you have depends on the response, it’s always a little hard.
wish to keep in your jerky, as well as how long you intend to keep it.
Short-term storage of jerky, ranging from one to three months, necessitates the use of an airtight container.
a stand-up pouch, a Mylar bag, or a mason jar that is airtight Depending
Depending on the consistency you want to keep, a food-grade desiccant can help.
keep a stable moisture level in your jerky Desiccants act as a moisture barrier.
moisture in the packing, which could assist preserve the product by decreasing the amount of time it is exposed to the elements.
a water concentration A desiccant can also function without being wet.
to package in a hermetically sealed manner This sort of packaging is frequently seen with
Jerky from the store.
If you’re going to keep your jerky for a long time, vacuum seal it.
You’ll be able to keep the moisture in while keeping the air out by using bags. Include an oxygen source.
absorber to keep your jerky fresh and consistent, as well as to prevent it from drying out.
preventing your jerky from rotting You can keep your jerky for more than a year!
Mold also appears to grow or develop.
In a high-moisture atmosphere, things move faster. As a result, the refrigerator is not a good option.
Unless the jerky is vacuum sealed, this is the best location to keep it. Jerky, on the other hand, is dried.
It’s not necessary to keep meat refrigerated in the first place.
It’s important to keep in mind that, according to
E.Coli can survive drying, according to a study published in the American Medical Association.
temperatures of up to 145 degrees F and times of up to 10 hours It’s true.
It is suggested that venison being dried for jerky be precooked to an internal temperature of 160F.
A minimum internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit is required. Consumers such as hunters and others
must understand that wild game must be handled and cooked in the same manner as domestic game.
Other meats should be handled with caution.
Is it necessary to keep homemade jerky refrigerated?
Backpackers, campers, and outdoor sports enthusiasts will appreciate the convenience of jerky, a light, dried meat product.
It does not need to be refrigerated.
Beef, hog, venison, or smoked turkey breast can all be used to make jerky.
(Because of the texture and flavor of the completed product, raw fowl is generally not advised for creating jerky.)
Raw meats can be infected with disease-causing germs.
These hazardous bacteria thrive in moist, high-protein foods like meat and poultry, and if the products are not handled properly, they can cause disease.
Before slicing and marinating pig or wild game for jerky, the flesh should be treated to kill the trichinella parasite.
Trichinosis is caused by this parasite.
Freeze a part of the meat that is 6 inches or less thick at 0oF or below for at least 30 days to treat it.
The bacteria in the meat will not be killed by freezing.
Follow these guidelines for safe meat and poultry handling:
- Before and after handling raw meats, wash hands thoroughly with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds.
- Refrigerate meat and poultry at 40F or below.
- Ground beef and poultry should be consumed within two days, red meats should be consumed within three to five days, or frozen for later use.
- Frozen meat should be thawed in the refrigerator rather than on the kitchen counter.
- Refrigerate the meat to marinate.
- The marinade should not be saved and reused.
When making jerky from wild animal, keep in mind that the position of the wound and the hunter’s ability can have an impact on the meat’s safety. Fecal germs can contaminate meat if the animal is wounded in such a way that the contents of its gut come into contact with the meat or the hunters hands when dressing the meat. It’s advisable to avoid producing jerky with this meat and only use it in recipes that call for it to be fully cooked. To avoid bacterial growth, deer carcasses should be quickly cooled. Allowing the internal temperature of the meat to reach 160oF while avoiding case hardening can reduce the risk of foodborne disease from home-dried jerky. Heating beef strips in a marinade before drying or heating dried jerky strips in an oven after the drying process is complete are two options. The instructions for both techniques can be found below. Drying periods are lowered when the strips are cooked in a marinade before drying. Traditional jerky will have a different color and texture.
Preparing the Meat
To make slicing easier, partially freeze the meat. The thickness of the beef strips will impact the safety of the methods suggested in this book. Meat should be sliced no thicker than 1/4 inch thick. All fat from meat should be removed and discarded since it quickly goes rancid. If you want a chewy jerky, slice it against the grain. If you want a more sensitive, brittle jerky, slice across the grain. If desired, a tenderizer can be used according to package directions. For added taste and tenderness, the meat can be marinated. Oil, salt, spices, and acid substances like vinegar, lemon juice, teriyaki, soy sauce, or wine may be used in marinade recipes.
