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Rating: 
Summary: Not recommended for USDA employees!
Review: Livingston takes a definite outdoorsman approach to jerky. He is sharply critical of USDA safety regulations, and he doesn't believe in nitrate cure as a preservative (he includes it in a few recipes, but says it's for preserving the color of the meat, not as a safety procedure). Some of the air-drying recipes gave me the willies just thinking about them! Livingston's approach to safety is to use meat from trusted sources, which often means avoiding the local supermarket in favor of a butcher or processor. He says if you use meat from known sources you'll avoid many problems. Good advice, but not always practical.
The book is lively and readable, but too many of the recipes are for curing 10 pounds of meat -- I wish he'd included smaller-quantity versions of some of them.
This is NOT the definitive book for beginning jerky-makers, but it's probably a good buy for an experienced jerky-maker to add to his/her library.
Rating:
Summary: A Book for Big Fans of Jerky
Review: Whether you are a big fan of jerky, or a fan of big (lots) of jerky, this book has something for you. I never knew there were so many different recipes for jerky until I bought this book. The results taste far better than anything I've ever bought in a store. I highly recommend the book. Recipes frequently call for several pounds of meat, but you can either scale them down, or just use less meat and make more marinade than you need. The novice chef needn't worry: The recipes are very simple.Another review notes that the author deviates from standard guidelines when it comes to cooking temperatures, and that's true. However, most recipes call for temperatures of 140 degrees, which is just slightly below the minimum temperature of 145 recommended by the FDA. When you consider that jerky spends 8-10 hours in the oven, I don't think food safety is an issue at these temperatures for anything other than pork, which the author recommends against. Recipes that call for lower temperatures are left to the reader's discretion, but clearly marked as such.
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