I love my rabbits. They offer me therapy, handling them and working with them each day is soothing to me. They offer me some of the best manure I can find for my gardens, allowing me to make my great soil in my raised beds even better. And of course, they provide wholesome meat for my family to consume, from a whole smoked rabbit, to ground rabbit sausage.

Making the leap from ground sausage to jerky was a minor one, and one I tried early on. I have had some failures, but for the most part, with a little effort, I can now produce a quality jerky that folks will stand in line to eat. I actually have folks on a waiting list for rabbit jerky.

The reason I say going from rabbit sausage to rabbit jerky is a simple step, is because rabbit sausage is ground rabbit plus spices, and rabbit jerky is ground rabbit plus spices run through a jerky gun then dehydrated.

When making jerky from any meat, I prefer using ground meat and my jerky gun because I get uniform pieces of jerky, similar to what you can buy in stores. My wife and kids will eat this, they won’t gnaw on a strip of jerky made from a tough cut of meat. Remember, “Happy Wife, Happy Life“. The ground meat version of jerky has all of the flavor, some of the texture, and none of the toughness of whole muscle jerky.

Jerky made from ground meat does require a bit of specialty equipment, namely a jerky gun and racks to hold the finer textured strips the jerky gun makes. My Excalibur dehydrator has 9 racks with a fine mesh that are perfect for this.

If you don’t have a jerky gun, you can use a rolling pin in place of the jerky gun. Place the ground meat on a cookie sheet and place a sheet of parchment paper over it to limit the meat sticking to the rolling pin. Take the rolling pin and roll it out to the desired thickness. Carefully remove the parchment paper, and then using either a pizza cutter or a knife, cut the meat into strips.

Oven drying is also an alternative to a dehydrator, as is a smoker. Just be sure to use a heat safe pan or tray for your oven or smoker.

When cooking/drying/smoking the meat, the magic temperature is 160 degrees. If using a dehydrator, it is recommended to precook your meat to 160 degrees before drying. The science behind this recommendation (from the USDA) is

Within a dehydrator or low-temperature oven, evaporating moisture absorbs most of the heat. Thus, the meat itself does not begin to rise in temperature until most of the moisture has evaporated. Therefore, when the dried meat temperature finally begins to rise, the bacteria have become more heat resistant and are more likely to survive. If these surviving bacteria are pathogenic, they can cause foodborne illness to those consuming the jerky.

I don’t do this, rather relying on safe handling practices and my dehydrators ability to achieve 160 degrees. According to the USDA, what I do is not safe. However, they also say on the same page that:

Drying is the world’s oldest and most common method of food preservation. Canning technology is less than 200 years old and freezing became practical only during this century when electricity became more and more available to people. Drying technology is both simple and readily available to most of the world’s culture.

Do “most of the world’s cultures” have the USDA’s guidelines, have thermometers, and use them both? I think not. I’m not saying foodborne illness isn’t a possibility, I’m saying proper handling and safe practices limit it. I take the chance, sort of (See below for my use of sodium nitrite to combat these issues). If you do the same, it is your choice, you have been warned. (I hope that satisfies my lawyer…he’s a regular reader :P)

 Next page, “MY steps to GOOD Rabbit Jerky” (click below)