Post #1644: No-salt turkey jerky, the re-run

 

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.

Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky

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. Continue reading Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky