dehydrators VS smokers

You really don't want to use a smoker indoors.

Besides turning the ceilings yellow you would find yourself single the first time you used it. ;)
 
fogducker said:
well besides the smoke issue:redface:..whats best to make jerky and pepperoni,s?
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I just marinaded some jerky tonight....will wait 24 hours mininum...then it goes in the over on 3 tiered drying rack(with drip pan)....1-1.5 hours with oven door open a crack....I will let you know how it turns out.

I purchased some High Mountain Cracked Pepper& Garlic for my first batch. I am also going to try some Terryaki, and Hickory as well.

I will let you know how it tastes Sunday.

Got the racks and Jerky marinade from SIR.

Beware though...seems pretty much ALL store-bought Jerky marinades include Nitrites to cure meat....a NOT so heart healthy ingredient. Homemade jerky marinade could probably be made with Soy sauce, salt and garlic.
 
350 Mag said:
I

Beware though...seems pretty much ALL store-bought Jerky marinades include Nitrites to cure meat....a NOT so heart healthy ingredient.
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Nothing wrong with nitrates/nitrites if eaten in moderation. The good they do - prevent botulism - outweighs the health risk they pose. The human body actually uses nitrite in the gut to prevent botulism in the food we eat as it is passing though the intestine.
 
Also ...........................

It appears nitrates may actually be heart healthy. :D

Nitrite/nitrate found in vegetables, cured meats and drinking water may help you survive a heart attack and recover quicker, according to a pre-clinical study led by a cardiovascular physiologist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Findings appeared in the Nov. 12 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mice fed an extra helping of nitrite and nitrate fared much better following a heart attack than those on a regular diet. The mice with extra nitrite had 48 percent less cell death in the heart following heart attack. Mice with a low nitrite/nitrate diet had 59 percent greater injury.

Mice with extra nitrite were also more likely to survive a heart attack or myocardial infarction. They had a survival rate of 77 percent compared to 58 percent for the mice that were nitrite deficient.

"This is a very significant finding given the fact that simple components of our diet -- nitrite and nitrate -- that we have been taught to fear and restrict in food can now protect the heart from injury. Simple changes in our daily dietary habits such as eating nitrite and nitrate rich foods such as fruits and vegetables and some meats in moderation can drastically improve outcome following a heart attack," said lead author Nathan S. Bryan, Ph.D., an assistant professor at UT-Houston's Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM).

The study, "Effects of dietary nitrite and nitrate on myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury" includes co-authors from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University: John W. Calvert, Ph.D.; John W. Elrod, Ph.D.; Susheel Gundewar, M.D.; Sang Yong Ji; and David J. Lefer, Ph.D.

The next logical step, according to Bryan, is to potentially monitor patients with known cardiovascular risk factors to determine if supplemental nitrite/nitrate in the diet can decrease the incidence and severity of heart attack and stroke or enhance recovery.

Nitrite forms nitric oxide gas during a heart attack which reopens closed or clogged arteries, thereby reducing the amount of permanent injury to the heart muscle, he said. "This paper provides the first demonstration of the consequences of changes in dietary nitrite and nitrate on nitric oxide biochemistry and the outcome of heart attack," Bryan said.

This year about 1.2 million Americans will have a first or recurrent heart attack, the American Heart Association reports. About 452,000 of these people will die. Coronary heart disease is the nation's single leading cause of death.

"Interestingly, formulations of topical nitrite preparations are effective in wound and burn healing. Clinical trials for such uses as well as diabetic skin ulcers are also underway. It appears that dietary supplementation of nitrites and their topical uses will be effective and inexpensive therapies due to their conversion to nitric oxide," said Ferid Murad, M.D., Ph.D., the 1998 Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine, which he shared for the discovery of nitric oxide as a signaling molecule. He also is director of the IMM's Center for Cell Signaling.

Although nitric oxide is metabolized to produce nitrite, which in turn produces nitrate, the process can be reversed in the body, allowing nitrite/nitrate laden plasma and heart tissue to create the vessel-widening, nitric oxide gas during oxygen deprivation, Bryan said.

Not limited to heart disease, Bryan believes dietary nitrite/nitrate will also help with other conditions characterized by a sudden disruption of blood or oxygen including stroke or peripheral vascular disease. He is aware of seven clinical trials involving nitrite/nitrate therapy but suggests that nitrite and nitrate should be investigated in terms of preventing disease as well as potential treatments.

Much maligned following a report in the 1960s linking nitrite/nitrate to cancer, according to Bryan, these nitrogen compounds should not be completely excluded from our diets and may one day even be viewed as nutrients. "The public perception is that nitrite/nitrate are carcinogens but they are not," he said. "Many studies implicating nitrite and nitrate in cancer are based on very weak epidemiological data. If nitrite and nitrate were harmful to us, then we would not be advised to eat green leafy vegetables or swallow our own saliva, which is enriched in nitrate."

Nitrite and nitrate are natural molecules produced in our body and our main dietary source of circulating nitrite, and nitrate in our body comes from eating vegetables and not cured or processed meats, Bryan pointed out. "Vegetables have up to 100 times more nitrate than processed meats -- so, the amount of nitrite and nitrate one may consume in processed or cured meats is far less than one consumes by eating, for example, a spinach salad," he said.

Bryan recently co-authored a second study also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating that the body produces massive amounts of nitrite from nitric oxide when oxygen is short supply. Tibetans, living nearly three miles above sea level, have 50 to 100 times more nitrite in their system than people at sea level. "This demonstrates that increasing nitrite availability is a natural, adaptive physiological response to low oxygen and does not cause cancer," he said.

----------------------------
Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
----------------------------
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'Boo said:
Also ...........................

It appears nitrates may actually be heart healthy. :D
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GREAT....now I can eat as much cured meat as I want....:dancingbanana:


Food additive
As a food additive, it serves a dual purpose in the food industry since it both alters the color of preserved fish and meats and also prevents growth of Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria which causes botulism. In the European Union it may be used only as a mixture with salt containing at most 0.6% sodium nitrite. It has the E number E250. Potassium nitrite (E249) is used in the same way.

While this chemical will prevent the growth of bacteria, it can be toxic for mammals. (LD50 in rats is 180 mg/kg.) For this reason, sodium nitrite sold as a food additive is dyed bright pink to avoid mistaking it for something else. Cooks and makers of charcuterie often simply refer to sodium nitrite as "pink salt".

Various dangers of using this as a food additive have been suggested and researched by scientists. A principal concern is the formation of carcinogenic N-nitrosamines by the reaction of sodium nitrite with amino acids in the presence of heat in an acidic environment. Its usage is carefully regulated in the production of cured products; in the United States, the concentration in finished products is limited to 200 ppm, and is usually lower. In about 1970, it was found that the addition of ascorbic acid inhibited nitrosamine production. U.S. manufacturing of cured meats now requires the addition of 500 ppm of ascorbic acid or erythorbic acid, a cheaper isomer. [1][2]Sodium nitrite has also been linked to triggering migraines.[3]

Recent studies have found a link between high processed meat consumption and colon cancer, possibly due to preservatives such as sodium nitrite.[4][5]

Recent studies have also found a link between frequent ingestion of meats cured with nitrites and the COPD form of lung disease.[6]


[edit] Disease treatment
Recently, sodium nitrite has been found to be an effective means to increase blood flow by dilating blood vessels, acting as a vasodilator. Research is ongoing to investigate its applicability towards treatments for sickle cell anemia, cyanide poisoning, heart attacks, brain aneurysms, and pulmonary hypertension in infants.[7][8]


[edit] Synthetic reagent
Sodium nitrite is used to convert amines into diazo compounds. The synthetic utility of such a reaction is to render the amino group labile for nucleophilic substitution, as the N2 group is a better leaving group.

In the laboratory, sodium nitrite is also used to destroy excess sodium azide.[9][10]

NaNO2 + H2SO4 → HNO2 + NaHSO4
2 NaN3 + 2 HNO2 → 3 N2 + 2 NO + 2 NaOH
 
Cracked pepper & garlic Hi Mtn Spice...mmmmmmmm...........I could eat fifteen lbs of CP&G jerky in one sitting

I use dehydrator but would like to try smoker
 
I use my smoker, I cut fiberglass screening to cover my wire racks, mix my ground venison with spices and shoot it onto the racks with my jerky cannon, dry and smoke for about 4 hrs at 150 f terrific jerky.
pepperoni depends on what kind of pepperoni you are talking about, pizza pepperoni, dried pepperoni or pepperett snack sticks the easiest is the pizza the hardest the dried sausage snack sticks are medium difficulty, not some thing for a first time sausage maker to start on. Sort of like giving a 300 mag to a kid who has never shot a gun and say go deer hunting. You need to work up to making snack sticks and dried sausage. If you really want to know how PM me its just too lengthy a process for here.
 
A smoker will make better jerky but definitely cannot be used indoors, I just started using one a few months ago, I use mine in the woodshed it has actually only been used twice (cord burned replacement on the way) and my shed still smells like smoke ( I like it)
 
I use both :)

Jerky goes into the Bradley Smoker for an hour or so (over a combination of Elder and Hickory), then gets finished in the dehydrator. I have done jerky start-to-finish in the smoker, but it takes all day. The dehydrator actually does it quicker/cheaper, and I can't tell the diff between stuff that's been smoked an hour and stuff that has smoked all day.

Hey...anyone have any good cure recipes they want to share?
 
Wrong Way said:
Jerky goes into the Bradley Smoker for an hour or so (over a combination of Elder and Hickory), then gets finished in the dehydrator.
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good idea! I guess the meat soaks up alot of the smoke when its moist, after that it just needs to dry...which happens quick in the dehydrator

Im gonna try that when I get my bradley :)
 
I use my smoker most of the time for making jerky until the outside temp get's below -20C. When it gets colder, I'll smoke for 6 hours then put it in the oven @ 150F with the door partially open to finish the drying process.
Smokers and dehydrators actually do different things; I'd reccomend having both.
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X2
 
Wrong Way said:
Hey...anyone have any good cure recipes they want to share?
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I have made Jerky only a few times now but I make all of my own brines simply by feel and experimentation. My best 2 recipes so far was:

Maple Pepper, where Maple is the sugar source, some kosher salt and some fresh ground pepper. Quantities of ingredients can be determined using other recipes.

Honey Garlic, where Honey and Coca cola is the sugar source, a little koher salt and lots of garlic.
 
thanks for the offer, but I can get a Bradley pretty cheap, I am going to get a digital one sometime before spring I think! :)
 
today i was at bass pro to check out the dehydrators..they had a nice unit but was way to big for my needs..then they had a few that looked like a
a cheaply made steamer..it was all plastic..
then i went to lebaron,but they dont even carry them..no surprise there:rolleyes:..
so any opinions on any model of dehydrators out there?
thanks for all the opinions so far here..
 
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