Best way to figure out calories in homemade jerky?

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questionfear
questionfear Posts: 527 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I like making my own beef jerky, and this weekend I experimented with making ground beef jerky. I didn't know how to figure out calories, so I just entered 2.5lbs ground meat and spices into the recipe builder, then guesstimated that I ended up with around 75 pieces of jerky.

It's not a big deal, but the pieces aren't uniform, so while it will average out over time, it's hard to ballpark per calorie on the jerky. Weighing it isn't going to help much, since it's obviously significantly lighter than it was before all the moisture got sucked out of it.

As an aside-ground beef jerky needs a lot of spices. I did not spice it enough and now I have jerky that tastes like dehydrated hamburger. It's not bad, and I bet it will be awesome with cheese, but it's missing the smokey salty goodness that most jerky offers.

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  • Nachise
    Nachise Posts: 395 Member
    edited June 2016
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    If you don't add enough salt to the original recipe, it will compromise the keeping ability of the jerky. Make sure you keep it refrigerated to prolong the shelf life. The nutrient value of the original ingredients, divided by the portion size, should give you the calorie count.
  • rosebarnalice
    rosebarnalice Posts: 3,488 Member
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    I regularly make homemade jerky.

    For future reference, I weigh the ingredients prior to cooking/drying. After drying, I weight the finished product so I can use the wet-weight to enter into the recipe builder, but use the dry weight to calculate the number of servings (I figure a standard 28 grams dried as a "serving" --which is comparable to commercial jerky portion sizes).

  • questionfear
    questionfear Posts: 527 Member
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    Nachise wrote: »
    If you don't add enough salt to the original recipe, it will compromise the keeping ability of the jerky. Make sure you keep it refrigerated to prolong the shelf life. The nutrient value of the original ingredients, divided by the portion size, should give you the calorie count.

    I know, I am assuming this has a short shelf life and keeping it in the fridge in the meantime. It was also a slightly fattier mix than I would have liked, I was just trying to go through ground beef since we had a ton of extra from a BBQ. I figure I have about a week on this unless I freeze it.
    rosebarnalice wrote: »
    I regularly make homemade jerky.

    For future reference, I weigh the ingredients prior to cooking/drying. After drying, I weight the finished product so I can use the wet-weight to enter into the recipe builder, but use the dry weight to calculate the number of servings (I figure a standard 28 grams dried as a "serving" --which is comparable to commercial jerky portion sizes).

    Cool, I will try to weigh everything like this next time.

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