Home Meat Curing Enthusiast & Dad
It started with a food dehydrator my wife bought me for Christmas eight years ago. I made a batch of teriyaki beef jerky that weekend — too salty, too chewy, barely edible — and got completely hooked on figuring out why. I’m , a dad of three from outside Milwaukee who has turned his garage into a part-time jerky lab and subjected my family to hundreds of experimental batches over the years. They’re good sports about it. Most of the time.
I’ve worked through pretty much every method for making jerky at home: dehydrators, smokers, kitchen ovens, cure ratios, marinade chemistry, slice thickness, and meat selection. I’ve made jerky from beef, venison, turkey, salmon, and a few things my kids won’t let me mention. My approach is practical — I care about food safety, flavor, and whether something actually works for a normal household without professional equipment.
Eight years in, I’ve logged over 400 documented batches. Every single one has an entry in my batch notebook — cut of meat, exact thickness, marinade recipe by weight, cure type and ratio, dehydrator model and temperature, total run time, and tasting notes from me and at least one reluctant family member. What started as curiosity about a bad batch of teriyaki turned into something that looks a lot more like a methodology.
By the Numbers
Food safety isn’t a disclaimer I add at the end of a recipe — it’s how I think about jerky from the start. I’ve spent real time with the USDA FSIS guidelines on jerky safety, and I understand why water activity (aw) is the actual measure of shelf stability rather than just appearance or texture. I know the difference between Prague Powder #1 and Prague Powder #2, why it matters whether you’re doing a wet or dry cure, and how to calculate safe nitrite ratios by meat weight rather than guessing. For dehydrator users specifically, I follow the pre-heat method — finishing strips in a 275°F oven before or after dehydrating to ensure internal temps reach 160°F for beef and 165°F for poultry — because USDA research shows that dehydrators alone often can’t reliably hit those temperatures throughout the load.
On the equipment side: I currently run three dehydrators simultaneously in the garage. My main workhorse is an Excalibur 9-tray, which I use for high-volume batches and most of my baseline tests. I run a Cosori alongside it for parallel comparisons, and a commercial Weston when I need to push capacity or test under higher airflow conditions. Over eight years I’ve put eleven different dehydrators through real testing — not just a weekend, but repeated batches across different meat types and load sizes. I know which units have hot spots, which airflow designs actually penetrate a full load, and which wattage claims are a stretch.
I also get outside my own garage. I’ve judged the jerky category at the Wisconsin state fair for three years, which means I’ve evaluated a wide range of home-cured product beyond my own — different styles, regional traditions, texture preferences, and levels of cure. I’m also a member of a local meat curing club where we trade techniques, debate cure ratios, and occasionally get into surprisingly heated arguments about smoke ring. Getting that outside perspective has shaped how I evaluate my own work.
How I Test
When I’m comparing two dehydrators or testing a recipe variation, I run parallel batches from the same piece of meat — same thickness, same marinade, same cure weight — so I’m isolating the variable I’m actually trying to measure. Every batch gets logged: the equipment settings, the process, the outcome. If a batch fails, that’s in the log too. Eight years of failure notes are some of the most useful data I have.
JerkyScience is not a brand. I don’t have sponsorships, and I don’t accept free equipment in exchange for favorable coverage. If a manufacturer sends something unsolicited, I disclose it and run it through the same process as anything I bought myself. The goal is simple: give you the kind of honest, tested information that’s surprisingly hard to find when you’re trying to make good jerky at home. Whether you’re making your first batch or chasing a recipe you’ve been dialing in for years, this site is built for you — not for anyone trying to sell you something.