Saturday, November 20, 2010

Deer Jerky

Today I ground up the bowl full of meat pieces that I had from the deer. I do not have a nice electric meat grinder. I have the plain old, just like my grandmother used, cast iron manual meat grinder. I put the meat through twice and it made a decent deer burger.
With some of that ground deer meat, I made jerky. Unfortunately, I don't have measurements for you because it is just a kind of slap it in the bowl thing.
Several shakes of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce, a bit less of liquid smoke, then sprinkle the meat with garlic powder, onion powder, pepper and salt. Mix it all together with your hands. I then make flat pieces on my plastic flexible cutting boards and turn them over and gently push off the pieces onto the dehydrator tray.
These aren't quite done but between these and cooking up some bones for the dog, the whole house smells wonderful!

5 comments:

  1. My uncle used to hunt quite a bit and we always had lots of venison sausage. It was pretty tasty.
    Judy

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  2. We make it every year too but use a commercial mix. Do you not need to add some type of preservative?

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  3. When I saw the title of your post I couldn't help thinking... "Dear John" !
    Does the jerky keep for a long time? Presumably your intention is to preserve it for later use? How will you eat it?

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  4. Actually, I have never had any kind of jerky I have made (when we had rabbits, I made most of the meat into jerky) last more than a couple days. You eat it for a snack really. No I don't usually make it that way to preserve it, I just make it because we love to eat it, lol.
    The salt and dehydrating are the only preservative you need.
    I have not made venison sausage.I am going to have to look into that. I would love to try to make some type of Italian patty sausage from it. Thanks for the idea!

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  5. Having just learned how to make sausage, I'm hoping that someday I'll be in your situation and have venison! (Not too many hunters up in my area but I know a few.) For now I'll stick to what I can get in the grocery store on sale...

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