How Long to Dehydrate Beef Jerky: With Proof!

In the world of beef jerky, likely the most popular question that gets asked is how long to dehydrate the meat.

Truth be told, there is no set time frame for how long it takes. Drying times can vary based on the type of protein you’re working with, how thick you cut the meat, even the efficiency of the device you’re using to dehydrate with.

In general, I can tell you that with my dehydrator typical dehydration times are around 3 hours; This is with lean beef cut to 1/4″ thick, using a pre-heat treatment, and dehydrating at ~144F (verified with a probe thermometer).

Average Drying Time for Beef Jerky?

As someone who has followed nearly the same exact process for making beef jerky for over 15 years, I can say that in most cases it takes ~3 hours to dehydrate jerky.

Typically I set a timer for 3 hours and check – in most cases the beef jerky is finished.

How Does Thickness Affect Drying Time?

Most people recommend that you slice beef jerky to a thickness of between 1/8 – 1/4″ thick.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

• Thicker pieces take much longer to dehydrate
• Thicker pieces are less palatable and are more chewy – this is especially true if you prefer to slice your jerky with the grain.
• Marinating is impacted – aside from salt, most ingredients will barely penetrate meat. Slicing thinner increases the potential for flavor where-as there’s far less marinade flavor on thicker pieces.
• From a consumer perspective, jerky is meant to be a snack. Meaning it isn’t optimal to have 5-ish thick pieces (packaged based on weight) that you then force your customer to tear into smaller pieces.

Those are the main reasons, the one that’s pertinent to this article is that it takes longer to dehydrate.

To prove this, I sliced several pieces of jerky to various thicknesses and then dehydrated them.

Experiment parameters:

• London broil (from the chuck) is being used.
• I used my honey teriyaki marinade.
• All jerky was hand measured and sliced to the following thicknesses: 1/8″, 1/4″, and 1/2″.
• Jerky is pre-heat treated to 158F.
• Jerky is dehydrated at ~140F in my Avantco Dehydrator.

Here’s the 1/8″ after dehydrating, it finished after 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Here’s the 1/4″ after dehydrating, it finished after 2 hours and 53 minutes.

Here’s the 1/2″ after dehydrating, it finished after 6 hours 40 minutes.

So, as we can glean from the above, it takes much longer to dehydrate thicker pieces of beef jerky.

Thicker pieces also affect palatability and impact how easy the meat is to chew, store, package, etc.

Note: I did consider doing 3/4″ but that’s essentially the thickness of a steak (most steaks are 0.75 – 1.25 inches thick). Those thicknesses are typically used when air drying biltong for an extended period of time.

From the above, my preference is 1/4″ thick but 1/8″ is also totally fine. While I did use a ruler to measure all of the above slices, I simply eye-ball 1/8-1/4″ slices when I go cut meat for jerky.

How Does Temperature Affect Drying Time?

Similarly, temperature also has an impact on drying time.

To start, I pre-heat treat all my beef jerky in an oven set to 325F-375F for ~10 minutes – this is typically how long it takes 1/8-1/4″ thick slices of beef to reach 158F internal.

From there, I typically dehydrate my jerky at around ~140F.

Note: This is actually what’s recommended by the USDA – pre-heat treatment in your oven and then dehydrating in your device at around 130-140F.

In my opinion, the reason the USDA says 130-140F is because that’s the temperature most of these commercial devices are actually capable of reaching.

Most commercial dehydrators aren’t capable of reaching 158-165F, necessitating the need for a lethality pre-heat treatment.

My dehydrator is actually capable of reaching the ambient temperatures it states – I know because I’ve personally tested them. On the low end at 86F it’s accurate to +/-5F, on the high end of 196F, +/- 5F.

Every device is different though.

Something I’d suggest doing is setting your device to the maximum setting (usually 158-165F), then use an ambient probe thermometer to check what the actual temperature is inside your dehydrator.

Chances are 158F is actually near 130-140F (or lower) in most of these devices.

Another reason you don’t want to go too high with your temperature is that you risk case hardening the meat; Case hardening refers to beef jerky where-in the outside is dry but the inside is wet/moist.

On the 1/2″ thick slices, this is a very real problem – I physically had to tear ends of it apart as apposed to bend testing just to verify it was dry.

Even in my pre-heat treatment, I elevate the meat on the baking sheet with oven-safe cooling racks to prevent case-hardening.

Putting these Findings Together

Some actionable advice from this article:

To start, slice your meat to the recommended 1/8-1/4″ thickness. This thickness is standardized because it’s easy to chew and dehydrates faster than thick cut jerky.

Pre-heat/lethality treat your jerky in an oven set to 325F-375F for 10 minutes. Verify the internal temperature using a pre-set piece that you left thicker. When this piece reaches 158F, the thinner pieces are also 158F.

Verify the ambient temperature of your dehydrator – in most cases 158F on these devices is actually around 130-140F. Whatever temperature reaches 140F ambient, go with that.

For me that’s 144F (the pre-set temperature) and my device will bounce between 139F – 145F.

After pre-heat treatment, place your beef jerky in your dehydrator. For me, most of my beef jerky is finished in ~4 hours; A typical range is between 3-5 hours.

To verify the jerky is dehydrated, you can use the bend test. You can learn more about this test, in this article.