Five pounds goes in the dehydrator. How many bags come out?
Raw pounds in at your yield, whole two-ounce bags out with the leftover stated, and the true cost per finished pound your bag price has to clear — or run it backward from a target bag count to the meat you need to buy. Everything stays in your browser.
The batch
Run it backward
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the raw meat comes out of inventory the day you make the batch, and the yield-inflated true cost per finished pound lands in your ledger as the batch cost every bag price has to clear. See for makers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
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Jerky makers already do this math with a scale and a scrap of paper — weigh raw, weigh finished, mutter about a third. Here is the arithmetic behind the ritual, and which numbers are actually worth arguing about.
Why is yield a setting instead of a fixed number?
Because nobody's dehydrator agrees with anybody else's. Makers argue anywhere from 30 to 40 percent depending on the cut, how thin it's sliced, how wet the marinade runs, and how dry you like to pull it — a lean round sliced thin and pulled leathery sits at the low end, a thicker cut pulled softer at the high. We seed 35 because it's the middle of the argued range, not because it's true of your machine. The number that deserves to replace it is yours: weigh a batch in, weigh it out, and use that percentage from then on.
How does $6-a-pound meat turn into $18-a-pound jerky?
Most of what you paid for leaves as water. Five pounds of round at $6 is $30, add $3 of marinade and the batch costs $33 — but at a 35% yield you only keep 28 finished ounces, which is 1.75 pounds, so that $33 works out to $18.86 per finished pound. That's the number every bag price has to clear: spread across 14 two-ounce bags it's $2.36 a bag, before your time or packaging. One convention to know: marinade rides per-batch here, though some makers cost it per raw pound instead — either works if you stay consistent.
How much meat should I buy to fill 20 bags?
Run the math backward: 20 bags of 2 ounces is 40 finished ounces, or 2.5 finished pounds, and dividing by a 35% yield gets you just over 7.1 raw pounds. The calculator rounds that up to 7.2, because coming up short is the one direction you can't fix at the market table. The general shape is bags times bag ounces, divided by 16, divided by your yield — and the better your yield number, the tighter you can buy.
Can this tell me how dry is dry enough?
No, and it shouldn't try. Doneness is a call between your own tested process and the documentation from your equipment maker and your suppliers — this page only does weight arithmetic. What it can do is catch the consequence: where you pull a batch changes your yield, and your weigh-in, weigh-out history is where that decision shows up in the numbers.