All this dehydrator talk has got me frustrated. You don't need a
dehydrator! Go to your local hardware store and get as much square footage
of wire mesh (1/4" opening, also called wire cloth--get the rust-proofed
stuff) as you care to for a helluva lot less than any Chinamade dehydrator.
You can either bend the mesh on both ends into a U-shape--actually an
upsidedown U-- so that it stands up (a nice trick for travelers since a
small piece of wire cloth can be folded into nearly any piece of luggage
and set in front of a hotel's air conditioner) or make a frame of some sort
and set them up off the floor somehow. For far less than $20 you can have
20+ square ft! of drying area in the average pantry.

Then take the table or window fan you probably already own and point it at
the strips of (fresh, not thawed) meat laid out on the wire overnight (or
two nights if you live in a humid climate). There is no need to trim fat
(indeed, the fat is the _flavor_!!) since the resulting jerky will keep in
a frostfree fridge for at _least_ a week (kept loosely in a bowl--NOT
plastic wrapped) and you will probably gobble it up long before that.

Note that this works even with fatty fish like wild salmon, sardines,
herring, etc. But because they are so dripingly fatty, only the outside
gets crusty and the inside is Eskimo ripe. Yummy yum yum.

BTW, for beef jerky, I usually dry "beef belly" also known as brisket with
as much fat as I can find. Your butcher will likely slice the brisket on
request and your only trouble is laying out the strips on the wire mesh and
pressing the button on the fan.

I have written this all before but it seems to get lost in the archives. If
you like complicated pemmican recipes, go for it--the stuff will probably
keep forever and ever. But it is much simpler (and I suspect much more
"paleo") to dry foods at room temp in the (albiet manmade) wind.

Cheers,
Kirt

Secola  /\  Nieft
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