The Problem Index → Storage
My jerky and dried meat keep going wrong
The thing almost every old recipe and every beautiful video gets wrong: drying does not kill pathogens. It only puts them to sleep. The heat step has to happen somewhere.
What actually works
◇ Plausible
The two-window solar dehydrator
Excellent for fruit, herbs and vegetables. Runs 110–140°F, which is well below the 160°F kill step — not sufficient on its own for meat.
Mostly salvage◆ Proven
160°F internal, as a separate step
Oven before or after drying. The 1990s versions of these recipes hospitalized people, and those recipes are still circulating unchanged.
◆ Proven
Exhaust humidity flatline = done
When the air leaving the dehydrator stops dropping in humidity, the food has stopped giving up water. Far better than a clock.
Run the numbers
- Equilibrium cure calculator → — free calculator, works offline.
Also searched as
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