I just borrowed my son's food dehydrator and was wondering if anyone has any good recipes to prepare meat for dehydrating.  I am assuming you cut meat (steak - pork) into thin strips (how thin?).  Marinate the meat in something?  Fry or grill them to get most of the fat out.  Dehydrate (for how long?) and then keep refrigerated until ready to eat.  As you can see, I know nothing?  I love spicy and heavily peppered jerky.  I also assume you can buy fairly inexpensive cuts of meat, since you are marinating it well before cooking and drying.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Your right about that Solotripper.  I found a couple that look like real winners.  I appreciate the direction.

We are going in Aug this year and doing all our own food.  Look at
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)

They have some really good recipes for dehydrated meals and we're having a blast testing them out.  Basically if it is something you like to eat at home you may be able to modify it to the point where you can do "freezer bag" style cooking.

We have the American Harvest food dehydrator and love it.  We just need more trays.

In a nutshell it's a meal that has been dehydrated (or the ingredients will be cooked) when you add boiling water to the contents in a freezer bag and let things steep for 5-15 minutes. Viola - meal in a "pot" so to speak. No messy clean up, rinse out the freezer bag after eating, put it in your garbage to pack out and you basically clean your spoon/fork.  Enjoy the rest of your evening in front of the fire.

Many of the recipes use a foil packaged chicken/beef (or shrimp - yum) which is shelf stable and this way you have real meat not dehydrated chunks which can be chewy. Other than turkey burger we have not yet tried to do meat in the freezer bag type cooking.  Turkey burger worked remarkably well, far  better than I thought it would.

We've only done a couple experiments so far but I will never go back to pre-packaged freeze dried stuff now that I know I can take my wife's awesome cooking into the BW.

And it's remarkably easy to do with a dehydrator.

I make a lot of jerky, usually around three pounds at a time.  That equates to about 12 pounds of wet meat.  After several years of trying different cuts, I've settled on Round Steak as my meat of choice.  The first thing is that it is very lean and the second, although no less important is its a cheap cut of meat.  I usually pick up 20 pounds at a time when it goes on sale here (Colorado).  Right now it's going for $1.29/lb on sale, last year it was 0.99/lb.

Like others mentioned above, I cut it into 1/4 inch strips and marinate if for 36 hours or so before I dehydrate it.  I have several different recipes that range from salty and spicy to sweet and tangy.  My friends love it so much that I give it away as gifts.

The best part is that around $5.00 you can make an entire pound (dehydrated).  Thats a savings of $12.00 - $15.00 per pound when compared to the store made brands.  Plus you get to make the flavor you like best.