Gobble gobble...

H: Thanksgiving this year we ate lunch with my cousin and her family.  While we maintain a vegetarian style diet most of the time, I decided to purchase a fresh turkey so that whatever was left over would go into the dehydrator and become jerky for our hike.  

My cousin and her family eat very similar to what we do so take a moment to think how funny it was for a couple of vegetarians to cook a turkey.  Not having cooked a turkey in over 10 years (and having only cooked one or two in my life) I picked a 20 pound fresh turkey.  There should be leftovers from that right?  

My cousin and I stayed up gabbing about everything until about 11:59 PM on Wednesday when we started trying to figure out how early we'd have to get up the next day to get the bird in the oven and ready by 1:00 PM.  Then we realized that the biggest roaster pan in the house was only big enough for a chicken.  A debate was waged as to whether we should go out right then or in the morning for a disposable roaster.  

In the end we ended up not going out.  I pulled a magic trick and sawed the turkey in half.  Actually I carved the bird into pieces and part went into the tiny roaster and the rest went into a crockpot which was a bit bigger than the roasting pan!  In the end we had a cooked turkey (the meat was very juicy) and a ton of leftovers, but it wasn't pretty.  After the turkey was all cooked up I finally looked at jerky recipes and they all called for raw meat!  

Another funny twist to the day was that my cousin had bought a frozen 13 pound turkey without telling me.  I took her raw turkey home and once again mutilated a bird to make jerky... later I found that the dehydrator's website gives instructions on how to make jerky from cooked meat!

Below you'll see a pictures of turkey pre and post dehydrated.  

Somewhere between four and five pounds of turkey dehydrated down to about a pound.  I need to get better at keeping track of before and after weights.  I dried both white and dark meat.  Though I had removed all the fat possible, dark meat is just inherently too fatty to store long term in the way we are doing it but it does taste very delicious.  One baggie of dark meat went into the fridge for immediate consumption and three bags of white meat went into storage.  

About half the turkey went into the dehydrator and the rest ended up in soup.  It was quite a lot of work for the end result.  In future I plan to use ground meats as I have read that this will produce jerky with far less work.  Additionally, I will be able to use high quality lean meats and have them freshly ground.  

I have also been reading several recipes for dehydrating tofu into jerky and recently had a taste of mushroom jerky so I'm very excited to try this both out!