Beef jerky made in fan assisted oven - any experience?

[ZingDramaQueenOfSheeba]

I have discovered beef jerky a few weeks ago - mmmmm

But really expensive to buy so I've been looking at techniques and recipes to make it in the oven as I don't want to buy a food dehydrator just yet.

So, any tips and tricks, favourite recipes - I'm especially interested in how to make it in a fan assisted oven, apparently it's the air circulation which speeds up the drying process, not the heat alone.

You're definitely on the right track. It is the fan that circulates the air, and "dries" out the jerky. Keep the heat very low - I have seen some recipes suggest 100 celsius or lower.

I'm not sure though that making your own jerky might be cheaper and worth the effort. For example, I bulk-buy my jerky from MeatSnacker, and get 10 packs of 85g Wild West beef jerky for ??28.35:
www.meatsnacker.co.uk/collections/wild-west-beef-jerky

That's 850g of beef jerky. Normally you need more than twice the amount of raw beef (as it dehydrates), so to make the same jerky you would need 1.7kg of raw beef.

That comes to a break-even cost of ??16.67/kg for the raw beef + other ingredients + oven cost + your time. So if you think it will cost you more than ??16.67 to buy a kilo of beef, and the other ingredients, and add in the cost of your time and the gas for your oven (for a few hours) it would be more economical to just buy pre-packed jerky in bulk.