Anyone can dry a batch of meat once. Doing it the same way again, safe, evenly dried, at a yield you can predict, is where the guessing usually starts. Hooked on Jerky exists to kill that guessing: free calculators for the numbers that come up every batch, and plain-spoken guides that show the working behind them.
No account, no fluff, and nothing you type into a calculator ever leaves your browser. Just the temperature, the time, the salt and cure ratios, and the gear that’s actually worth the money.
What this site is for
Homemade jerky, venison, biltong and the rest of the dried-meat family live or die on a handful of numbers: the kill-step temperature, the drying time for your slice thickness, how much a batch shrinks, and the exact salt and cure weights that keep long-storage meat safe. Get those right and the recipe is the easy part.
- Time & Temp, your meat, thickness and machine, turned into a drying window and a safe kill-step check.
- Yield & Shrinkage, how much raw meat to buy for the finished weight you want.
- Best-Cut Selector, the right cut for classic, cheapest, leanest or most tender.
- Marinade Ratio, scale a marinade to your batch weight.
- Cure Safety, cure #1 and salt in grams, weighed, never eyeballed.
The one rule: safety isn’t optional
Drying meat that never got hot enough is how home jerky makes people sick. Every method guide on this site states the same kill-step flat: heat beef and venison to 160°F and poultry to 165°F, then dry. Biltong is the exception. It’s cured raw with salt and vinegar and air-dried cold, so its safety comes from the cure and airflow instead, and we say so on every biltong page. No fear-mongering, just the number that matters.
Where the numbers come from
The figures across this site, drying times, shrinkage bands, cure ratios, are kept consistent on purpose, so a guide can never quietly contradict the calculator it links to. Temperatures follow USDA guidance for making jerky safely at home. Where we ever quote a third party’s published figure, it’s credited to their own site with the date we read it.
How we keep the lights on
Hooked on Jerky is free and stays free. We cover the bills with display advertising and affiliate links to gear we’d put on our own bench, marked plainly every time. A commission never changes a recommendation or a number. The full story is on the affiliate disclosure page.
Get in touch
Corrections, cuts we missed, or a batch that went sideways, all genuinely useful. Send it over; every message gets read.