Development of a method to manufacture uncured, no-nitrate/nitrite-added whole muscle jerky

“Natural curing” is accomplished by use of vegetable juice/powder high in naturally occurring nitrates combined with a nitrate reducing starter culture to result in indirectly “cured” products. Since the starter culture used is not water soluble, making “naturally cured” whole muscle jerky with current manufacturing techniques has been found ineffective. The objective was to investigate processes for whole muscle beef jerky that might provide cured meat characteristics similar to those of a nitrite-added control. Treatments where jerky was placed in a barrier bag during incubation were found to be the least similar to the nitrite-added control. Jerky placed in a 40.6 °C smokehouse during incubation resulted in significantly more (P < 0.05) converted cured pigment than the barrier bag treatments but less (P < 0.05) than the control. The processing methods investigated to manufacture “naturally cured” whole muscle jerky in this study were ineffective in resulting in products similar to those cured with sodium nitrite.