Edited 2/22/2024
I made and ate no-salt turkey jerky, and lived to tell the tale.
I added a little salt-substitute (potassium chloride) for taste, at the rate of four teaspoons per cup of marinade. (See recipe below). In hindsight, a little more wouldn’t have hurt. But the only sodium in the jerky is what was already in the turkey when I started.
The long and the short of it is that you don’t need salt to make jerky safely. But it helps.
If you skip the salt, you’d be well-advised to do exactly as the USDA recommends for the rest of the processing steps. Mostly, that means cooking the meat before drying it. And then drying it quickly and thoroughly.
Below you see the results of an experiment with jerky made from ground beef heavily contaminated with e. coli. The bars show how much live e. coli remained in the meat. Shorter bars are better. (Note that this is a log scale, so every tick mark on the scale is a ten-fold increase in the concentration of e. coli.)
Source: Taken and substantially modified from: Judy A. Harrison, Mark A. Harrison, Ruth Ann Rose, Survival of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Ground Beef Jerky Assessed on Two Plating Media,Journal of Food Protection, Volume 61, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 11-13, https://doi.org/10.4315/0362-028X-61.1.11. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X22014806). Annotations in red are mine.
By eye, cooking the meat (right half versus left half, above) matters more than adding salt/nitrite curing mix to the meat (white bars versus black bars). Though, if you want the absolute minimum risk of contamination, you should do both.
After contemplating those results for a bit, I don’t think I’d try no-salt with anything but solid meat jerky. As shown below, using turkey. Ground meat seems a little too bacteria-friendly to allow you to slack off on any aspect of the processing.
Depends on your tolerance for risk, I guess. But that’s true of all home-preserved food.
Why am I making jerky?
Because I’m cheap.
I would like to tell you that I made a rational decision to produce a batch of turkey jerky this afternoon. But the the truth is, this is the result of an impulse purchase.
My local Safeway had turkey breasts on post-Thanksgiving sale at $0.59 a pound. I figured, top-quality animal protein at that price, how can I pass that up? So I bought a couple.
They are already thawed, and I’m pretty sure they were frozen at some point, so I don’t really want to pop them back in the freezer for some future meal. And, for sure, we’ve had enough turkey for the time being.
So, turkey jerky it is. And since I’m trying to avoid sodium, let’s make it no-salt turkey jerky. The perfect accompaniment to my somewhat-better-than-mediocre no-salt pickles (Posts G22-031, 32, 33, 36, 37).
An important note on order-of-operations: Only after I finished this batch did I realize that I did this inefficiently: Strictly speaking, there is no need to slice up raw meat, in order to make turkey jerky. As noted below, if you follow USDA food-safety guidelines, you end up cooking the turkey before you dehydrate it. A bit of internet search shows that you can, in fact, simply roast the turkey in the normal fashion, then slice up the cooked turkey and make jerky from that. But I tried that, in Post #1644, and the results were less-than-spectacular. You can make turkey jerky by slicing and drying cooked (e.g., left-over) turkey, but I found that the pieces had a lot of raw, ragged edges on them. So it works, but it’s even uglier than normal turkey jerky.
Conflicting food safety advice from the internet? Who would have guessed.
I’ve been making jerky, from time to time, for the better part of a decade. For me, it’s mostly a matter of cheapness, and having a useful hobby. When I spot a spectacularly good sale on meat at the local grocery store, I’ll bring home a few pounds and make a batch of jerky.
I don’t think I need to belabor the basics. You cut raw meat into thin slices, season it in some fashion, then heat it and dry it. It’s hardly rocket science. Humans have been doing it for millennia, under widely varying circumstances. So you can be reasonably assured that there’s a fair bit of leeway in the process, and that you are unlikely to kill yourself doing this. But plausibly, if you screw up badly enough, you can make yourself pretty sick.
As a bonus, I can season it to suit myself, rather than accept whatever commercial products are out there. As with this batch, which I’m going to make with salt substitute instead of salt. And I have the option to make it as dry as I want, to try to get a homemade jerky with a decent shelf life.
To be clear, I’m starting with non-pork meat from the grocery store. Accordingly, I’m not addressing a key safety step that you should take when making jerky from pork or wild game. There, the standard advice is to freeze the meat for at least a month before making jerky to ensure that any parasite larvae are dead (reference, reference).
Putting that aside, one odd aspect about home-made jerky is that:
a) the “official” rules for making jerky safely keep changing, and
b) seemingly reputable sources continue to offer conflicting safety advice.
c) many on-line jerky recipes ignore the safety steps that reputable sources consider mandatory for making jerky safely.
Thus saith the USDA
When it comes to food preservation and safety, I treat the USDA as gospel. They always set their recommendations so that, if followed properly, you have absolutely the smallest possible chance of poisoning yourself. And that’s a good thing. In other words, they are truly a set of safety-first guidelines for food preservation.
The most recent USDA advice it to heat your turkey strips to a minimum of 165F before dehydrating them (reference). Their reasoning is pretty straightforward. You need those temperatures to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. Coli. If you just chuck the meat strips directly into a dehydrator, they will spend hours at temperatures well below that, as the moisture evaporating from the meat cools the meat. That gives hours for bacteria to multiply before you (hopefully) reach a temperature that will kill the bacteria.
In addition, many dehydrators will not reach 165F (my Nesco will not), and most have extremely crude temperature controls, so you’re not guaranteed that you will ever reach 165F with a dehydrator alone. Finally, it’s much harder to kill those bacteria after the meat is dry, than it is while the meat is still wet. So the USDA refers to this as killing the bacteria with moist heat.
To put it more plainly, the USDA says to cook the meat before you dehydrate it. That 165F is, in fact, the minimum temperature for safe cooking of poultry (reference). So the safety-assured USDA process is to slice up the meat, cook it, then dehydrate it.
Interestingly, this is one of two officially-sanctioned methods that I ran across the last time I made jerky. The other was to subject the meat to a high-acid (e.g., vinegar) marinade, in effect, pickling it before dehydrating it. The USDA does not mention an acidic marinade prior to drying as an acceptable alternative to heating the meat to 165F. So that’s a clear change from the last time I did this.
Finally, USDA research (same reference as above) shows that salt is helpful, but not completely necessary, for killing potential pathogens in jerky. In their controlled experiments using ground beef innoculated with E. Coli, bacterial kill rates where higher in meats treated with a curing mix containing salt and sodium nitrite.
My takeaway from that last piece is that if I’m skipping the salt, I should be darned careful about the rest of it.
Other Reputable Sources
First, everyone says that you should not trust the temperature settings on your dehydrator to be accurate. Instead, insert a thermometer to test the internal temperature.
Okay, then.
University of Minnesota Extension Service say that instead of cooking the meat ahead of time, you can heat the jerky to 275F after dehydrating it (reference). Place the fully-dehydrated jerky into a pre-heated oven, set to 275F, for 10 minutes. They describe that as providing a margin of safety for otherwise properly produced jerky.
North Dakota University Extension Service gives you the option of pre-cooking the turkey to 165F, or cooking it briefly in a boiling marinade (reference). Either way, their recommendations amount to cooking the meat before dehydrating it into jerky.
University of Wyoming extension service continues to recommend lengthy pre-treatment with a cold acidic marinade as an acceptable alternative to cooking the meat prior to dehydrating it (reference). Their recipe calls for marinating 24 hours in vinegar and spices. Alternatively, they say you can get by with cooking the meat briefly in boiling brine (salt water) before dehydrating. The same two alternatives are offered by Colorado State (reference).
Ohio State University recommends boiling the meat strips in marinade for five minutes before dehydrating (reference). They will also accept the USDA-recommended pre-cooking to 165F, or the method of post-cooking it at 275F.
At this point, I think that’s enough to know the options. Only one source (University of Wyoming) suggests a method that doesn’t amount to cooking the meat either before or after dehydrating. (Their alternative was a 24-hour acidic marinade).
Given that I want to get this done in an afternoon, my options are to cook the meat beforehand, cook it afterwards, or both. I think the easiest thing for me to do is boil the strips in marinade for five minutes. Depending on how paranoid I feel afterwards, I might just post-cook them at 275F as well.
Directions.
Step 1: Slice up the turkey. Put the turkey breasts in the freezer for an hour or two until they are just “slushy”, that is, slightly frozen but not frozen hard. This greatly speeds the slicing.
Debone, and cut the turkey into strips 1/4″ thick. This step was sloppy, messy, and generally no fun. The size of the resulting meat strips was all over the place.It’s a lot harder to slice up turkey breast than it is to slice up beef.
The weights were:
- Total package weight, whole (bone-in) turkey breast, 8.6 pounds.
- Usable strips, 3.6 pounds.
- Final product (very dry jerky), 14 ounces.
The rest is fluids, skin, bone, neck, and meat that I didn’t remove from the turkey breasts. Perhaps a better butcher would have gotten a modestly higher yield.
This means my $0.59/lb turkey breasts actually cost $1.40/lb for usable meat strips, and ultimately $5.80 a pound for the jerky. And that I got about one ounce of jerky for every four ounces of meat, which apparently is typical for turkey jerky.
But I also get a pot of turkey soup out of the carcasses. Because who doesn’t want another batch of turkey soup on the Monday after Thanksgiving?
Step 2: Make up a marinade. This is what I put together for roughly four pounds of turkey strips:
- 1/2 cup vinegar
- 1/2 cup water
- 2 teaspoons garlic powder
- 2 teaspoons mustard powder
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- 2 teaspoons liquid smoke
- 4 teaspoons salt substitute (potassium chloride)
All of that is “to taste” except the salt substitute. The resulting jerky is not spicy at all, which is just fine by me. YMMV.
I estimated the potassium chloride based on typical recipes that use soy sauce, and the amount of salt in soy sauce. In theory, this should be close to a one-to-one replacement by weight of potassium chloride with the typical amount of salt (sodium chloride) in common jerky recipes. In hindsight, I should have upped the potassium chloride a bit. But it’s OK as stated.
Step 3: Cook and drain the meat. Place that in a pot, place the turkey strips in the pot, mix to coat, and boil it until all the turkey is cooked. Dump in a colander, let let it drain, then spread on dehydrator trays.
Step 4: Dehydrate. Set the dehydrator to its maximum temperature, and run until they appear done. Note that I am, in fact, dehydrating fully-cooked turkey slices, as the USDA recommends. You should normally stop this when the slices will just snap when bent sharply. By contrast, I let these go to the super-dry “crunchy” stage, as I am shooting for an extended shelf life.
Depending on your level of food safety paranoia, when they appear do be done, place them on a cookie sheet and bake for 10 minutes at 275F. I skipped that, given how dry the final product was.
Store at room temperature or refrigerate for greatest shelf life.
Step 5: Taste. The final product was acceptable, given that a) it’s turkey, and b) there’s no salt (sodium) in the recipe. It’s quite savory and quite mild, which is fine by me. As with most jerky, if I closed my eyes before eating it, I’d have no idea what the underlying meat was.
My wife’s sole comment was “looks like dog treats”. Can’t argue there. But jerky is hardly a thing of beauty in the best of circumstances. And the taste — savory, mild, just a hint of salt and spices — is just the way I like it.
