Coconut Ground Beef Jerky

Choosing The Ground Meat

Start with a lean ground beef, 10% fat at the most. Using a leaner ground meat will allow the jerky to last longer when stored since fat goes bad before the meat.

Therefor the less fat you have in the meat the longer it will last.

Marinating the meat

I recently purchased some LorAnn cooking oil flavorings that can be added to recipes. For this jerky recipe I used coconut!

Whenever making ground jerky, always use curing salt to prevent any potential bacteria within the meat. Since the meat is ground and will be mixed by hand use disposable latex gloves (affiliate link)

The potential for the introduction of bacteria is higher with ground meat than when making whole muscle jerky.

In the picture above you can see I dissolved the ¼tsp of curing salt in 2tbsp of water and 1tsp of the coconut flavor.

TIP: Dissolving the curing salt in water allows it to more evenly be mixed into the ground meat.

Add the other ingredients to the curing salt/water/flavoring mixture and mix well. Then pour the marinade into a bowl with the ground meat and mix together well.

Make sure the meat and marinade is mixed together well and evenly so the flavor will be consistent throughout the whole batch. Remember to use your food safe gloves when mixing.

Cover the bowl and place the mixed meat in the refrigerator for 1-8 hours to help the meat bind together. This will help the jerky strips stay together when forming them in the next step.

Forming the Jerky Strips

There are two ways to form jerky strips when making ground meat jerky.

The first is using a Jerky Cannon, the method I used when making this recipe.

The second is flattening out the meat with a roller pin and scoring the meat with a knife.

To see how to make ground jerky using the roller pin, check out my How to Make Ground Jerky Page.

If using a jerky cannon, load the cannon with meat making sure to prevent any air pockets within the meat.

To do this, push the lever that is found by the handle all the way to the front only leaving about 3 inches of room from the end you can see above. 

Fill that 3 inches of space with the jerky mixture and then pull that lever back another 3 inches.

Pulling the lever back is essentially pulling the piston towards the handle giving you more room for more jerky mixture. Continue doing this until the whole pound of ground jerky is added into the cylinder.

Keep a butter knife next to you when shooting your strips onto the dehydrator tray to cut the meat from the nozzle after you have finished a long strip. 

Then use that knife to score your strips into your desired individual jerky lengths. I chose to score mine at about 4-5 inches in length.

Drying the jerky

Using my Excalibur Dehydrator was how I chose to make this ground beef jerky recipe. You can use a smoker or an oven as well if you choose.

Dehydrator

The dehydrator is easy and quick. After 'shooting' the strips onto the trays, they were dried at 165F for 3 hours and 145F for 1 hour until they were finished.

Oven

Place your oven tray with the jerky strips on the center rack. Bake at 170 degrees for 4-6 hours.

Place a wooden spoon in the door of the oven to leave it open about an inch. This allows air to escape the oven and help dehydrate the ground beef jerky.