First time making Jerky and Zucchini chips (with photos)

Hi guys,

Hope you're all having a nice day. Yesterday I posted about my new food dehydrator; today I have photos .

Below is a pic of my new dehydrator with some zucchini chips and berries drying.

Next up, my finished zucchini chips; some lightly salted, some with salt and pepper. No oils or anything, just mandolin cut zucchini and the salt/pepper.

Finally, here's the beef jerky. It was my first time and I was concerned about under-doing it and think I overdid it and left it in a tad too long. It tastes yummy anyway.

The glass has 100 grams of jerky; I ended up with 500 grams, which is about 17.6 ounces, which is a LOT of jerky, lol. For just one person, anyway.

Mmmm, it all looks so good!

Thank you; it is yummy. I love the zucchini chips with tuna salad.

I love beef jerky and it is so expensive to buy at the butcher. How much did you pay for your dehydrator? What type of beef did you use for it?

I paid about $150 for the dehydrator at Walmart. They had cheaper ones for around $70 dollars at Canadian Tire, but i read the reviews and the cheaper ones have trays that break after the first few uses. Mine is the smallest one made by Excalibur, and it had only good reviews, plus it came with a 5 year warranty. They make a nice 5 tray one that is way longer and wider, so the trays are bigger. Mine holds 4 square feet of food, which is enough for one person so good for me, but I would have liked the bigger one. It also comes in a 9 tray version, but it's super expensive (to me).

I used top sirloin because it was on sale at Metro, but have learned I'd get best results with Top or Bottom round cuts. You can use any beef as long as it's very lean; too much fat will make it go rancid. I ended up with over 500 grams of jerky and paid about 17 dollars for the meat. I separated the meat into ten 50 gram baggies.

Walmart sells jerky snack packs holding 35 grams for $2.49. If I would have separated my jerky into 35 gram baggies I would have ended up with 14 baggies of jerky, plus a bit left over. To buy 14 bags of Walmart snack pack jerky would have cost me $35.57, and I paid $17 to make the same amount. I'm going to look for beef sales and freeze it when I find it, to save even more money.

I'm very much a newbie at this. There's a lot of info out there about dehydrating, some conflicting, so I have a lot to learn.

Omg!...Lol...There's two of us! :)

LOL :-)

That looks amazing...and I'm seconding Monica's questions!!!

I found a food dehydrator at Value Village and paid $15.00 dollars for it. I've had it for years and it works great. Dehydrators range anywhere from $60.00 right on up into the hundreds.

We are hunters in my house so we make a lot of goose and venison jerky. Love it.

That is awesome! I looked at second hand stores for 2 months, and even posted on Facebook asking if anyone had a used one to sell me, but nobody did. I finally gave in and bought a new one. Of course, now that I have, I'll no doubt find one second hand tomorrow, lol.

Have you tried making yogurt leather in your dehydator? I found a recipe online and it looks good, but they say to use full fat yogurt and I'm wondering why. I'd like to mix my plain Greek or Skyr yogurt with some berries to try it, but don't want to waste the yogurt as it's not high fat.