We put some liquid smoke in one tray.

I see on Youtube there are a lot of ways to do it. Some make strips by hand. Some using a meat gun that looks like a big caulking gun. Some strings shaped like a Slim Jim out of one of those guns. Then we ran across a lady that had a round dehydrator that just did the whole layer kind of like we did. Then she just cut it up into pizza like slices with kitchen scisors. That looked like way less work than making the stirps and was an easy way to get it all pretty even thickness. So we did it that way and it worked good. Cuts up after done with scisors in a breeze.

We had a silicone baking thingy (swiss roll baking tray wife says) that is used to bake roll up cakes or whatever. Wife put the one pound of ground beef in the middle of the square sheet and mashed it down by hand pretty well. Then she put a parchment paper over the meat and used a rolling pin to mash it down and out to fill the tray appropriately. Once it was all rolled out to suit her (while sometimes pushing a little bit by hand around the edges that got a little wide of mark) she peeled off the parchment paper. Then she put a silicone mesh sheet over the fresh thin hamburger and the dehydrator tray on top of that. Then flipped the whole stack over with the silicone mat now on top of the meat, silicone mesh and wire dehydrator tray. Then peeled the silicone thingy off the top of the meat. Made for very uniform thickness meat. Then it went into the dehydrator.

Worked slick. We did half the dehydrator full 5 trays of the hamburger 5 pounds of ground beef (the other 5 trays had cooked chicken). Set the thermostat to 165 at 6 hours. At that temperature it is basically cooking the meat and is at the level the USDA says is safe. I suspect a person could do a lower heat especially if using some curing salt in the meat. But this being our first experience we went by the manual suggestions and figured better safe than sorry.

I think we want to try some seasoning curing salt in some for a little longer shelf life. We just put this in the fridge or some of it we froze as we didn't figure we would get to eating all of it within two weeks. Two weeks in the fridge seems to be what most of the Youtube people said it would keep safely.

We are learning. Open to suggestions.

Glad you were able to use your funky beef. Deer to me tastes kind of funky. I know a lot of deer hunters make a lot of deer jerky.

We bought a meat slicer to do it with frozen ground beef (wife has been wanting a slicer for many years so just a good excuse to get one). But this worked so slick I don't know if we will end up using the slicer much or not. We could make up a bunch in not too much time invested. Then just set the timer and temperature on the dehydrator and let it go.