Venison Jerky...

The Farmer had a successful deer hunt this year and we were blessed with venison.  Aside from the tenderloins and a few roasts, we had most of the meat ground.  I take it to our local butcher and he grinds the venison with pork, about 1/3 of the weight of the venison.  I  usually then freeze the ground meat and use it for chili, hotdishes, seasoned sausage patties, tacos, etc.  This year, after adding pork, we had about 70lbs of ground meat.  I froze approx. 50lbs. in one pound packages and the other 20 lbs., I intend to make into venison jerky. 

So far, I've made 10lbs of jerky.  Here's how it's done.  I divide the ground meat into 2lb balls.  I mix the seasoning and cure with each ball.  Then refrigerate anywhere from four hours to overnight. 

I then place the seasoned ground meat into the jerky gun. 

When the gun is full, I pump strips of ground meat onto dehydrator trays.  I have an older American Harvest Dehydrator that came with four trays.  It took about 2 1/2 lbs of meat to fill all four trays. 

I then dehydrate the meat for approx. 2 hours.  I'm sure each dehydrator is different so either follow your dehydrator manual or experiment.  The meat should be stiff and dry with a jerky like consistency.  One of my batches didn't seem quite done after two hours.  It was soft and limp, so I ran it an extra hour to be sure it was done.

I store the jerky in Ziploc bags in the refrigerator.  Although, I'm not sure how long it will last.  The kids were eating it faster than I could bag it :)