I toyed with the idea of putting this in the "recipes" section of the site, but really, I just poured in the seasoning packet and called it good, so it's not a recipe in the strictest sense. Then I went to "blog" but realized that a cooking gear review might be the most appropriate.

As you probably know, one of my goals is to make enough jerky to supply our trip this year without having to buy any. To that end, I went out yesterday and purchased a Nesco/American Harvest "Jumbo Jerky Works" kit.

According to the packaging, the kit includes:

• Large jerky gun with stainless steel trigger and ratchet bar - holds 1 lb. of ground meat
• 3 attachments - make jerky strips, sticks, or double strips
• 5 Original flavor jerky spice and cure packets included

I priced it out on line and ended up going to a local Meijer to actually buy it. Price of the kit: $12.99 + tax. Far cheaper than I could have ordered it online. Everything was fine in the package, no complaints. The gun itself is mostly plastic, and I probably wouldn't trust it to the dish washer. It's pretty cheaply made, but I believe that it will suit my needs well enough.

I've made marinated jerky before, but never from ground meat. Last summer we bought a 1/4 steer and still have some ground beef in the freezer. The ground meat is nice and lean, so I thought it would be a good choice. Past experience is that the fat strips in sliced jerky tend to taste pretty awful. With ground beef, it seems that most of the fat cooks away and you are left with nice lean piece of jerky.

The first step was to mix up the ground beef with one of the included seasoning packets. While the meat was marinating, I washed all the parts of the jerky gun. One nice thing about the ground meat jerky is that you don't have to wait 24 hours or so for the meat to fully marinade. As soon as I'd washed and dried the gun, I loaded a full pound of meat into it and got started.

The three attachments are as follows:

• 3/8" round
• 2 1/8" x 1/8" single-strip
• 7/8" x 1/8" double-strip

I started with the double-strip and filled the outside circumference of one level my Nesco/American Harvest food dehydrator. Then I switched to the round attachment and finished off the tube. I needed to use two levels of the dehydrator, but the second level was nowhere near full. I would say it would probably take three levels to do two pounds of beef. The biggest issue that I found was that the round tip is about three times longer than the single- and double-strip tips. I didn't realize the impact of this until I'd pushed out as much beef from the gun, and still had a pretty good-sized meatball left in the tip. I ended up manually rolling the left-over beef into a tube, so I didn't "lose" anything as a result.

My experience with sliced jerky is that the thickness of the strips has a significant impact on dehydration time as well as how "chewy" the jerky is once it's all done. Since there is very little control of the thickness when using the Jerky Works gun, I believe that the drying time would be much more consistent. As it was, I left the meat drying for about 7.5 hours (the dehydrator was set to its highest setting - 165°F). During the drying time, I periodically (about every hour) soaked up the fat using paper towels. This is a very important step, since you don't want the fat going rancid on you. The dehydration was split into two sessions, since I didn't want to leave the meat on the dehydrator over night. I put it in the refrigerator and did the last two hours or so when I woke up in the morning.

Let's face it, making jerky isn't exactly rocket science. The kit makes it about as easy as it could possibly be. Both set-up and clean up were easy, and the use of ground meat and pre-packaged seasonings simplifies the preparation completely. There isn't anything stellar about the flavor -- it's regular beef jerky. I look forward to trying out some other flavors and possibly even ground turkey before our annual outing.

I give it four out of five campfires.