The Undisputed Winner in the ‘Jerky Category’

Four in the morning. Channel surfing with a friend. The choices:

Nick at Nite’s “Rhoda” episode of the evening: Joe (David Groh) has dinner with Rhoda’s mother (Nancy Walker). On TNT, a James Bond film festival. In the upper 30s, a Mexican soap opera.

Venturing into still-higher channels, I find Ron--Ron Popeil, who wants to be my friend, who wants to make sure I make my own beef jerky at less than $5 a pound instead of paying more than “$36 a pound!” for store-bought jerky.

It matters not that neither I nor anyone else I know buys store-bought jerky by the pound.

“I,” Popeil will tell me proudly more than a year later, “created the jerky category.”

Jerky is an odd thing. At first blush, it looks pretty gross--meat desiccated into snackdom. It has long been the sustenance of truckers and campers--kind of a carnivorous trail mix. And now, all sorts of other dried hunks of animal--turkey jerky, chicken jerky, even emu jerky--are surfacing across the land.

My friend buys the Ronco Food Dehydrator for me, with just four easy payments of $15 each. And yes, even at 4 a.m., operators really are standing by.

A few short weeks later, it arrives, accompanied by the Ronco Dial-O-Matic, a flimsy-looking plastic outfit that will slice all of the vegetables and fruits I’m going to be drying. One problem: I want it only for beef.

It’s a big brown plastic job that resembles a nexus of the spaceship from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and the Watergate Hotel in Washington. I also get, I see, a booklet of top jerky recipes from around the globe. Truly an international treat, this dried meat snack.

Ron Popeil has spent millions advertising this doohickey, which uses heat convection to do everything from make raisins to dry herbs to, yes, make jerky. This was Popeil’s comeback, the invention that resurrected him from bankruptcy-caused exile into the world of infomercials in 1989. This is his big-ticket item.

The beef (rump roast, sliced wafer-thin) marinates, in a combination of soy, liquid smoke and various hot sauces and spices, before being arranged on stacked trays inside the dehydrator, which is plugged in. I leave for several hours.

When I return, the kitchen is filled with the smell of meat, and lo--jerky. At least, it resembles jerky. A few hours more and it will be edible, ready for a cross-country trip in a tractor-trailer rig.

I have taken a perfectly good rump roast and dried it into oblivion. And it tastes great. I am happy. My friend is happy. Ron Popeil is happy that I am happy. All is well in the world of jerky.

America. What a great country.