Nothing exceeds like excess.
For this second round, I decided to amp up the turkey jerky processing. I purchased several more discount turkey breasts from my local Safeway, to try out the idea of making jerky from fully-roasted turkey.
Recall from the just-prior post that the USDA safety guidelines for jerky call for you to cook the meat (to 165F) before drying it. That being the case, why was I going through the hassle of butchering and slicing raw turkey? I looked around on the internet and, sure enough, some people simply make jerky out of roast turkey. No need to cut up the raw meat.
In this round I gave that a try.
It works, kind of. It’s certainly a lot less messy, and a lot easier. But the cooked turkey tends to fall apart rather than cut cleanly. So I ended up with a lot of variation in the thickness of the “slices”. That’s a bad thing, when making jerky, as it generates variation in the extent to which the meat absorbs the marinade, and variation in drying time.
I used the same marinade as in the last post, but increased the salt substitute by 50% and dropped the liquid smoke. The final product this time has just enough saltiness to be satisfying, without being spicy.
The whole process yielded two pounds of rather ugly-looking turkey jerky, at a meat cost of $3.50 per pound. That’s starting from turkey breasts at $0.59 a pound. Compare that to what appears to be the going rate on Amazon of about $1.50 an ounce.
Plus, I get yet another pot of turkey soup out of it. Because, who doesn’t want yet more turkey soup, on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.
Judging from what was left in the Safeway meat case, I could probably keep this up for another week or so. But I think I’ve had enough. Two pounds of jerky is a lot.
The only thing left to do is to estimate the sodium content of this turkey jerky. I didn’t use any salt (sodium chloride), but the turkey itself has some naturally, and likely has some from whatever it was injected with by the meat processor.
Near as I can tell, four ounces of turkey contains about 100 mg of sodium. The rule of thumb is that you get an ounce of turkey jerky for every four ounces of raw meat. So this should end up with roughly 100 mg of sodium per ounce of turkey jerky. That puts this in the same league as Strollo’s, the lowest-sodium jerky on the market, with just 65 mg sodium per ounce.
Mission accomplished. It’s completely possible to make a tasty low-sodium turkey jerky at home. And you can make it from leftover roast turkey.
