Dude a hobby is anything that makes you happy. If you like meats there is a huge cured meet community. You can learn every on youtube (things I've watched at 3am when I should have been sleeping)

The culinary arts can be a hobby

You can define anything as your hobby.

One of the most unusual ones I have seen is a guy who uses RV bulldozers and excavators and dump trucks to dig out his basement.

It is wild and incredibly involved.

A hobby is whatever you decide is a hobby.

I don't have anything constructive to add, so here's this:

Hey everyone…

We are live from my back yard where I am

Smokin' these meats
Meat like a brisket
I’m makin' meats now
Someone asked me, do I smoke meats?
It’s gonna be delicious
Yeah, I smoke meat
That’s what I’m talkin' about, yeah

Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Say my name, baby
Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Smokin' meats

Hello to you
Thanks for hanging out with me
In my backyard
While I’m smokin these meats, too

The thing about smokin meat is it takes a long time
Sitting around with my WiFi

I like racing
Grilling meats, um, racing cars are
Two of the most fun things that you can do

Manual transmission, um, I enjoy that
Do I hunt, um, yeah

Smokin' these meats
Meat like a brisket
I’m makin' meats now
Someone asked me, do I smoke meats?
It’s gonna be delicious
Yeah, I smoke meat
That’s what I’m talkin' about, yeah

Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Say my name, baby
Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Smokin' meats

You smoke lemon chicken, smoked salmon
You’ll love it
Bison sirloin, ribs and sausage
We got some more of it
Pork ribs, we got a brisket
You don’t, you don’t, you don’t want to miss it

We have just applied the Sweet Baby Ray’s
I want my baby back, baby back ribs
You know, it’s a weekend man;
break out the purple shirt
I wear the grey shirt to work

While I was smoking meats earlier in the day
I started a triathlon
Swam about a mile, it’s a long way
Biked about twenty miles
And then… I had to go deal with something
So I had to abort

Smokin' these meats Meat like a brisket I’m makin' meats now Someone asked me, do I smoke meats? It’s gonna be delicious Yeah, I smoke meat That’s what I’m talkin' about, yeah

Smokin' these meats
Meat like a brisket
I’m makin' meats now
Someone asked me, do I smoke meats?
It’s gonna be delicious
Yeah, I smoke meat
That’s what I’m talkin' about, yeah

Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Say my name, baby
Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Smokin' meats

Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Say my name, baby
Gimme the Zucc, gimme the Zucc
Z-U-C-C, Zucc
Smokin' meats, baby

https://youtube.com/watch?v=p4mrLEm_nUo

Dude, I fucking love your head space. Choosing your next fun time thing to do based on a linguistics debate you started with your self.

That's my kind of neurotic.

Hope you have a blast either way!

My take is a hobby is what you enjoy doing in your down time. Even if you made the exact same recipe the exact same way every week, so long as it's the thing you choose to do to relax, I'd call it a hobby.

Why do you need other people to decide that for you? It is both culinary skill and hobby. Life does not fit in categories described by single words.

Most of my hobbies involve consumables. I love to garden, cook, herbalism (tinctures, salves, teas, etc.) and foraging. Making jerky would totally fit in what I would love to do.

I love making things to share with friends, family and myself. Also I LOVE to eat and drink so it makes sense to focus my time and energy on it. Go for it dude

Imo, preserving is its own hobby. Beef jerky, biltong, pemmican, sauerkraut, kimchi, fruit leather, jams.

My reasoning: brewing beer is considered its own hobby by most. But it could technically be part of culinary > preserving > fermenting (yeast) > beer.

Sourdough is also in fermenting (yeast) as is wine, but people don't expect a hobby beer brewer to try them out as well.

So within preserving we have fermenting (yeast), fermenting (lactobacillus), drying, canning, pickling, smoking,?salt brining, etc.

Culinary is so big, it's like art. If I want to learn calligraphy, do I have to do portraits, photography, music and poetry too? Just a thought.

As a vegetarian, I'm going to say yes because gate keeping is dumb.

Yes. Preserving food is literally a whole science

A trick I use when deciding between closely balanced possibilities is to flip a coin. If you immediately think to yourself I wanted the other side, switch. Job done.

That said, first, IMO hobby shmobby. Perhaps you actually want to do jerky but are caught up on definitions, but also why not both?

Do one hour of each, 4 tomato seeds and a tray of water (+ nutrients? idk) in the sun, see what happens. I know little about hydroponics but have been meaning to try that bottle method (Kratky Method) for mint. Just crack out a minimum viable product and refine later.

I occasionally do jerky, actually got an air fryer specifically because it did dehydrate and it works fine (more than 10C resolution would have been nice, but adjust time as needed), get some stacking wire trays to do more. Use what you have, make it stable at 60-70C, I've used an oven on low cracked open a tiny bit with a thermometer in the past, wasteful but works. To get started just do a baseline without marinade. Get a round or other lean cut, half freeze it (easier to slice), sharp knife, slice as thin as practical, don't sweat the mistakes. Start dehydrating it. Come back in 4 hours and have a look (don't keep checking too often, messes with temperature) and every hour after until you think it's done. Eat. That'll do for a first pass, refine.

TLDR: pick one or two and have a go, try not to overthink.

A hobby is pretty much anything you do other than what you do for your own or someone else's sustenance. Getting paid to barbecue for customers paying you? Not a hobby. Grilling some burgers at dinner time because you or your family are hungry? Not a hobby. Spending hours and weekends on end slow cooking a particularly challenging piece of meat? Hobby. Eating an expensive piece of meat (as a treat)? Also a hobby.

Sounds to me like you are about to start two hobbies.

Why don't you consider culinary skills as hobbies?

I think learning how to make jerky is a perfectly fine example of a hobby one can take up. My father once went on a journey to make the best salmon jerky he could. He spent years trying out different smokers, different cuts of fish, different times, different wood chips, etc. I definitely consider that hobby activity!

I’m just posting to boost and to say that the pic of the rockwool threw me for a loop lol

I think you're the one who gets to decide what is and isn't something you would consider a hobby.

Literally anything can be a hobby if you do it for fun on purpose.

It is a hobby.

End thread.

Definitely counts as a hobby. It just happens to be a hobby that requires and develops cooking skills.

Cooking can be a hobby. This is just a subset of it.

It's all of those things.

Any skill can be a hobby if you're acquiring it just because instead of because you need it.

Since everyone has already made good points...

What does that picture have to do with the question?

You want a hobby that you can take into old age that promotes self sufficiency, raise chickens and ducks. Eggs that taste fuckin amazing compared to store bought. Can set up to support yourself and scale to supply eggs for a whole community without moch added effort. Theyre fun little idiots when it comes to pet quality. Then eat them when youre done with them.

Ngl, and I don't think you are a bot, but this feels like one of those astroturfed askreddit questions that come from bots.

Like who cares other than you as to what you feel like you should do with your weekend be it make jerky or plant tomatoes?

Do both. Follow whichever you're excited about right now. If it changes do the other one. Or do them at the same time.

If you do plants though I reccomend starting small, it makes it easier to figure things out and make smaller mistakes, which helps keep you from getting burnt out. There are no rules though, go big if you wanna :)

Hobbies are just things we spend our time on because they bring us joy or peace, that we do for our own sakes. The very important key- do the ones you want to. Follow that joy, excitement or curiosity. Do whatever that leads you to :)

But why can't cooking be the hobby and beef jerky be a focus within your hobby

If it’s more akin to a culinary skill, then I plan to go on a deep dive to the back bottom corners of my closet to find my rock wool cubes and plant 20 hydroponic tomato seeds before the end of this weekend.

So that's what that is! With a mixture of the title and the image, initially thought this was a "Do you know how much space it takes to make one bag of beef jerky vs "this plant"".

Also, you made me hungry for pişmaniye
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi%C5%9Fmaniye

Another user already made the point about enjoyment, but allow me to add another one: Every activity can be turned into a hobby if it is pursued with intent and intensity: You can flip burgers and the you can triple-flip burgers, salting them in midair and send them flying into a bun you juggled in your other hand.

Jokes aside, if you enjoy making beef jerky and spend your time perfectioning this particular skill, it is certainly your hobby.