I love making beef jerky. There are two main kinds: whole-muscle jerky, meaning strips of beef which are marinated and then dried, and ground-meat jerky, which is made from ground meat to which seasonings have been added.

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each has its own unique texture. Whole-muscle jerky has a longer prep time because it must be marinated (or, if you use a dry seasoning, you must wrap it up and refrigerate it to give time for the seasonings to penetrate). I usually make whole-muscle jerky, but I’d been meaning to make some ground-meat jerky as a change of pace.

The marinade for whole-muscle jerky can be easily assembled from ingredients like worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and liquid smoke, and it leaves a lot of room for improvisation and tweaking to fit your individual tastes.

There are recipes for homemade dry seasonings for ground meat jerky, but I’ve always been hesitant to use them. You see, there’s a slightly larger risk of food-borne illness from ground meat. (This is why some places will let you have a rare steak but not a rare hamburger.) I’ve never had any problem with any batch of jerky I’ve made, but I still like to be careful. That usually means using a commercial seasoning for ground meat jerky, because commercial seasonings include a sodium nitrite cure.

I love Hi Mountain Jerky seasonings, but I can’t find them in the store locally anymore. Kroger carried Shore Lunch, a competing brand, for a while, but I can’t find that locally any more either. In fact, Shore Lunch no longer lists jerky seasoning as one of the products on its web site. My remaining stash of those products is so old it needs to be thrown out.

Anyway, I didn’t want to do mail order, so I decided to do the next best thing and buy the jerky seasoning that is packaged by the dehydrator manufacturers and sold next to the dehydrators in the appliance section of Walmart. Walmart used to carry NESCO/American Harvest dehydrators, jerky guns and seasoning, but now it seems they’ve switched to Oster. (The NESCO products are still available at the Walmart web site.) So I bought a box of the Oster seasoning today.

The appliance-maker seasonings aren’t bad, per se, they just aren’t very interesting, especially compared to the variety of flavors offered by Hi Mountain. I did add some red pepper flake and black pepper to try to liven things up a bit. It’s drying now; we’ll see how it comes out.

By the way, if you’re in the market for a dehydrator, don’t buy the Oster unit. It does not have a variable temperature control, which is absolutely essential if you want to use your dehydrator for other things (banana or apple chips, for example). For just a few dollars more, you can get a better dehydrator. That’s nothing against Walmart; in fact, they have a nice selection at their web site and you can get one shipped to store and save the shipping costs.

Or you can go the Amazon route. Here, with my affiliate link, is the dehydrator I’ve used for years:

Which reminds me; I haven’t made apple or banana chips in ages. Maybe that will be my next project.