Homemade beef jerky question

I'd do after. If you were eating a store bought piece of jerky, the weight would be after drying.

Btw, a nice lean london broil makes some good jerky, too.

Take the entire weight of the raw beef and use the calories from that as the calories of the entire recipe. The jerky will weigh less after it's been dried, but that's only water loss. None of the weight loss comes from anything with calories.

So if you use a pound of raw steak and after smoking it weighs 3/4 lb, the entire finished recipe will have the same amount of calories as a pound of raw steak.

Also, it the rub you used contains significant calories (like from a lot of sugar or oil) be sure to add that into the recipe as well

There may be some entries in MFP for homemade jerky, but I would not trust the accuracy, because some people may make their jerky drier or moister than you do, and that would affect the weight.

I do what was suggested above. When I make jerky, I enter it into a recipe on MFP....based on the raw ingredients, but use the final weight (in grams) as the servings. SO I wait until it is complete to make the recipe entry (I just write the weights of everything down as I go).

So for example if my entire recipe (raw) weighs 100 grams and is 100 calories for all ingredients, but the final product weighs 50grams (cooked)....I record 50 servings and it logs it as 2 calories a gram.