I recently purchased a dehydrator. I made dehydrated pineapples and they came out really good. I canned them afterwards with a pressure cooker in Ball Jars. I'm hoping they'll last for awhile being that they're dehydrated and canned. I was thinking about dehydrating venison to preserve it. I am not a hunter. Is there a good place to get venison? Are there any tricks to making venison jerky? I was thinking about adding salt to it to make it last longer. I know you need to cut it thin to make the jerky. I'm not sure how long I could expect it to last.
Buy Mary T. Ball's book (Amazon had it) a lot of good hints and recipes. While you wait, make some banana chips and hack up a couple apples for the experiments. So far as glomming onto some venison, check around at the butcher shops and ask. After deer season, a lot of hunters swap meat for the butchering of their deer. (Not all hunters can butcher their own harvest.) There are also a LOT of recipes on line. To make it clear, drying for preserving has some other stuff you have to do to get the meat ready for longer term storage than until tomorrow's snackage. I imagine that some other monkeys will slap you silly with recipes. In fact, poking around a bit will uncover some already here. We'll move the thread to recipes when it gets longer.
For venison, you should check around for a "Game" supplier, usually those vendors supply the restraunts with their exotic wares, a feller could do pretty well, though it will likely be spendy! Up here, we have a vendor called Willamette Valley Meats who can supply just about anything you could want! The wife loves buffalo meat, and reindeer, ( and there is no hunting for them around these parts) so that's how we get those meats! I tried some of their Elk, it was quite good, but expensive!
I wonder if it's best to cook the meat before dehydrating. That would probably kill any lyme disease spirochetes that it could have. I live in Massachusetts, so I'm sure the deer around here all have 20 different types of lyme. I'll poke around on the the internet and see if I can find some recipes and look up Mary Ball's book. There may also be something similar to Willamette Valley Meats in the Northeast. I do love exotic meats.