Beef Jerky

Jerky is meat with the water taken out of it, which is the oldest preservation there is and the reason a bag of it is the protein in every bug-out bag. Commercial jerky, sealed with an oxygen absorber, keeps two years and more; homemade jerky, which is usually fattier and wetter, is a month or two in a jar. The difference is fat and moisture, and this page is about managing both.

Vacuum-sealed or nitrogen-flushed bags with an oxygen absorber inside, which is how the long-keeping brands are packed; a bag that is puffed and loose will not last the way a tight one does. Lean cuts dry best. Read the sugar and sodium; jerky is salty by design, and the sweet varieties go sticky sooner. For home drying, buy the leanest roast you can, eye of round or top round, and trim every scrap of fat.

Sealed bags in a cool, dark, dry place; heat is what turns the fat rancid. Once opened, into a glass jar or a zip bag with the air pressed out, and refrigerated if it will be around more than a few weeks. Homemade jerky goes into a jar with a desiccant packet, and the batch that will not be eaten in a month goes in the freezer. Jerky packed in Mylar with an oxygen absorber keeps longer than the jar, but the moisture limit matters: only jerky dried hard enough to crack when bent.

Mold, in any color, and the whole bag goes. A rancid or sour smell is the fat turning; it will not make you sick in small amounts but it's done. A sticky, wet surface on jerky that was dry means moisture got in and mold is next. Hard and brittle is just dry; it's fine and softens in soup.

An ounce of jerky is about 70 to 100 calories and 9 to 12 grams of protein, and it needs no cooking, no water and no fridge, which is why it is in the bag and the truck. It is also the start of a stew: a handful simmered in water with rice and dried vegetables is a meal. To make it: lean meat sliced a quarter inch with the grain, a salt-based marinade, dried at 145 to 160°F until it cracks but does not snap, which takes 4 to 8 hours in a dehydrator; cooking the strips to 160°F first (or heating the finished jerky in a 275°F oven for 10 minutes) is the food-safety step that keeps home jerky from carrying what the store version cannot.

Jerky is the food an outage was made for. The sealed bags on the shelf are unchanged; the open jar in the fridge is fine for weeks in a cool room. In a long outage, a dehydrator on a power station or a sun-and-screen setup is how the meat from a thawing freezer becomes jerky instead of waste.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.