Susan,

I forgot to mention: For a long time I did the traditional meat-slicing, which works great as long as I plan ahead and re-sharpen my wife's kitchen knives before I start... then I decided to try running the meat thru the meat grinder instead - huge labor savings, even including cleaning the grinder. Extremely coarse grind, of course. First several times I rolled out the ground meat on waxed paper and flipped the giant "patties" onto the trays. I fiddled around with scoring the patty with a table knife first as well. That all worked fine. Then I saw this gizzmo in her baking stuff that looks like a caulk gun (sorta) - I think it's for cookie dough. Anyway, I use that now - works great. I see the stores now have something similar called a "jerky shooter" and if you get to making lots of jerky, give one a whirl.

Tom