My Pemmican Experiment

What is Pemmican?

In the realm of cooking adventures, I recently tried making pemmican for the first time.  While there are a few things which did not go as intended, I overall am definitely pleased with the results, and plan on making it again and working out the last few kinks.

Historically, pemmican was the traditional travel-food of Native Americans.  European settlers soon picked up the practice, and it was used extensively by fur trappers, travelers, and arctic explorers.  Pemmican was essentially a mix of animal fat and ground-up dried meat (jerky), sometimes with dried fruit mixed in.  Because the meat (and fruit, if included) were thoroughly dried beforehand, pemmican contained almost no moisture, impeding bacterial growth so effectively that it could keep for years at room temperature.  

Furthermore, pemmican was a nutritional powerhouse; the high fat content made it very calorically dense, and the fat combined with the jerky meant that it contained all the nutrients found in meat (and in the very bioavailable form that nutrients in meat tend to be found).  You could live on pemmican alone for an indefinitely long period of time.

I am starting taking classes in Boston several times a week this fall, which is an hour-and-a-half commute from my home in New Hampshire. I knew I would want to eat when I was down in Boston but didn’t want to try to find (and pay for) healthy food – so I figured, why not try to make the original primal survival food?

Disclaimer: Pemmican is a preserved food, and, as such, proper care must be taken to avoid food-borne illness.  Make sure your ingredients are fresh, and that they are properly prepared – especially since drying jerky does not involve the high temperatures of normal cooking, it is very important that the jerky is properly dried to prevent bacterial growth.  Like all activities described on this blog, do your own research and realize that you are doing this at your own risk (see my full disclaimer).

Ingredients

• Jerky.  Native Americans would have used dried bison, caribou, elk, venison, or other lean wild game, but you can use beef, fish, or any other dried lean meat.  You can use premade jerky, which makes this recipe considerably easier – but it also makes it more expensive.  I used lean beef.  The important thing, if you choose to make your own jerky, is to use very lean meat so that it dries properly.
• Animal fat.  If you have access to bear or bison fat, by all means use it, but most of you will want to use tallow (from beef) or lard (from pork).  You can buy tallow which has already been rendered (heated and strained), or you can buy suet and render it into tallow yourself – this is the first time that I tried to render suet, with less than perfect results (see below for more details).
• Dried fruit is optional – if you are keeping your carbs low, skip the fruit or keep quantities small.  You can buy pre-dried fruit, but if you do, be careful, because commercially prepared dried fruit very often contains added sugar.  I chose to dry my own blueberries.

The Recipe

• A word about quantities.  Making Pemmican is not like baking – you have some leeway with quantities.  Native Americans used jerky to fat in a ratio of 1:1, but modern recipes sometimes call for more meat and less fat, with a meat to fat ratio as high as 6:1.  Play around and see what works for you – I used about three pounds of meat (pre-drying – it will weigh significantly less after you dry it) and about three cups of melted fat.  I think this ratio was pretty good.  I dried a pint of fresh blueberries, which, after the drying process, actually came out to very little.  I was ok with this, because I wanted a meat-heavy, low carb version with just a bit of blueberry to add some panache, but be aware that you will need to add a lot more if you want a fruity pemmican.

• Drying your jerky.  If you are drying your own jerky, take very lean meat (I used three pounds of beef, but you can also use fish or game like venison) and cut it into the thinnest slices you can – under a ¼ inch thick (and ideally under an ⅛ of an inch thick). 

• If you have a dehydrator, follow the manufacturer’s directions for making jerky; if not, you will need to use your oven.  This will take a lot longer than a dehydrator, because an oven does not have a fan to help the meat dry quicker (you can leave the oven door open a crack and blow a fan inside to speed up the process a little bit).  Put parchment paper on a cookie sheet, and spread the meat in a layer one-piece thick on the cookie sheet.  Put the meat in the oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit until it is very dry and breaks when you bend it – this took me about eight hours.  I also flipped it several times throughout the process.  You can add salt to the meat while it is drying (or other seasonings, such as pepper if you want).

• If you are rendering your own tallow, you can render it while the meat is drying.  Full disclosure: I had never rendered tallow before, and had the heat too high and burned it.  So, be sure to have the heat lower than you think you need to be on the safe side.  (I have heard there is a way of rendering tallow in the crockpot which avoids the risk of burning it – I plan on trying that next time.  Stay tuned!)  Suet is beef fat which still has connective tissue in it.  Take your block of suet (my one-and-a-half-pound block yielded about three cups of tallow), cut it into cubes, and put it in a saucepan on low heat (notice I stressed low heat).  As the fat melts, the pieces of connective tissue will separate and come to the surface.  Once the fat has been simmering for several hours, and the chunks at the top are crispy and golden-brown, remove the suet from the heat and strain it through a cheesecloth.

• If you are drying your own fruit, wash the fruit and smash it up into a paste.  Put it in a food dehydrator, or put it on a cookie sheet and dry it in the oven with the jerky (my blueberries also took eight hours to dry).

• Once the suet is rendered into tallow and the jerky and fruit are dried, it’s time to mix it all together!  Grind the jerky in a food processor as fine as you can make it (it is very hard and brittle, so do this in small batches to avoid damaging your machine).  You can throw the fruit in with the jerky, but I hand chopped it into small pieces instead so that I could taste the little pieces of blueberry better.  If your tallow is solid, melt it a little bit in the microwave or on the stovetop so that it mixes better, than mix it all up!  Separate it into balls or patties, and put it on a cookie sheet to solidify. (Because I burned my batch of tallow, I ended up using a mix of beef tallow and bacon fat because that was what I had around – note that, if you use bacon fat, it will be slightly softer at room temperature than if you used pure tallow.)  

• If it is made correctly, pemmican can be kept at room temperature for months or even years, but I put it in the freezer to harden it up quickly and to be on the safe side.  If you do store it at room temperature, keep it covered and in a cool, dry place away from light.  

Things I Could Have Done Better

• I ruined my first batch of suet by burning it while rendering it into tallow.  Be sure to go very slowly over very low heat when you are rendering suet.  I will try the crockpot method next time – stay tuned for an update on that!
• I wonder if I should have ground the jerky more finely before mixing it with the fat and blueberries.  There were still some chunks in the final product – which was ok, but I think a smoother consistency would have been easier to eat.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I would consider my pemmican experiment a success.  While it wasn’t gourmet dining, it was still pretty tasty – and it worked well as travel food, which was what I was aiming for.

Pemmican is a little complicated to make, so it might be ambitious to try making if you are new to an ancestral way of eating (although it would be a lot less work if you bought premade jerky and tallow – albeit also more expensive).  Still, if you are looking for a slightly challenging ancestral cooking project, or you want to make the ultimate survival food, give it a try.  I will certainly be making it again and modifying my recipe – stay tuned for updates!