How about a meat tenderizer hammer, whatever its called? In Europe our family used it extensively.

Ya man, that's what Chef's have been using for years. It makes sense when you think about it - you're literally tearing away at the fibers/tendons of the meat which makes it easier to chew/digest. Good idea bringing it up in this thread. Not sure why I haven't done it before but I think I'll combine that with soaking it in my secret coca cola/pineapple acidic mix to see how it changes the taste/texture.

Tenderizing Jerky?

Seems jerky has changed over the years as we used to just dry the odd meat cuts in the folks oven with the door cracked a bit. Parents owned a grocery store and so my father was a butcher for 30+ years. He wouldn't allow our moose in the butcher department for legal reasons and scoffed at our pathetic butchering at home as it wasn't quite up to his standards... 😆 (mind you I don't remember his offering to teach either) 😐

We'd label alot of meat "butt crack" and "armpit" just to really annoy him when he searched the freezer, but we always had alot of "chunks of meat" as we obviously had no idea how to butcher. Dad would tell us we didn't note the grain of the meat when we cut and we'd just figure 😯 "whah"? 😕 and thus we made tons of burger and oven dried jerky, dried to a crisp!

We did add 1 thing alot....salt! That's the recipe....wanna copy? Now you filled baggies(non-sealable in them days) with handfulls of strands(as it was stringy) of this crap and tossed them in every empty coffee and tobacco can we could find. You'd then grab a bag or two when you went outdoors and your didn't try to chew this stuff as that didn't work...you sucked it for awhile until it was soft enough to chew and so that you didn't choke on it when you finally swallowed....that is what I thought all jerky was like! It kept your mouth moist and a bag lasted for hours. Ever suck on a pebble to get you saliva going so you didn't have a dry mouth and throat? Well sucking our our jerky was better than doing that...but not by much! 🙄 🙁

Then they started selling this stuff in the stores that was as soft as pepperoni sticks! I was hooked! That crap was sooo much better than sucking on rawhide. But I'd leave it laying around and never knew that their stuff spoiled much faster until I ate some moldy crap one day and didn't quite notice til I finally tasted "fur"!... Now moose has next to no fat so that is my excuse for not knowing better (so shut up) 👿 ... store crap only keeps like a week once opened...what the heck! Man, I've caught northern pike using old moose jerky as bait. I've found pieces in my truck seat that have been there for who knows how long and appear quite eatable (don't ask). And when you can't find anything that resembled meat to throw in the pot along with the other fixings you brought for a bush meal, you dropped in some chewy stringy jerky to choke down and knew it was still a stew that would put a smile on any starving Ethiopian's face. 😯

But now I too even have burger "grease gun" applicator to make that pre-chewed jerky just like the big 😕 😎 store does as I'm obviously too lazy to chew "Real Jerky" anymore...

Che - well said