Pemmican

[Hamradioop]

Info on pemmican

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-m ... z2anq77Ua7

[tigs]

looks yummy but its a great idea for survival food

[fuppingbaxtard]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but don't knock pemmican until you try it! I made some basic pemmican yesterday.

Dehydrated some beef until it got to the jerky stage... then kept going!

The stuff was rock hard after a few more hours, snapping like a twig. I bunged it into a blender and it sounded like gravel was being blended! Eventually the chunks of meat got worn down to a fluffy consistency. I then made up some tallow from atora suet, let it stand so that the flour in the atora mix settled, and poured the clear stuff into my ground beef. Half an hour later, I had a cake of pemmican that I cut into bars and vacsealed in bags. I tried a bit of raw pemmican and it was... not pleasant. Like eating a candle.

Today, however, curiosity got the better of me. I ripped open one of the bags and fried it with onions and potatoes, a dash of worcester sauce, pepper and a good amount of water to make a 'gravy'.

It looked utterly gross - the entire process of making pemmican is utterly gross - but... to my surprise... the stuff was absolutely DELICIOUS.

So, yeah, looks like the rest of my pemmican, which I had made for a rainy day... might be getting eaten this week. It's just a shame it's so calorie dense or I'd be eating more right now!

[Jamesey1981]

Pemmican is pretty grim as is, but if you add something acidic to it when you make it like dried cranberries for example, it becomes a whole different thing, I've banned myself from making it, would have ended up not being able to fit through my door.

[preparedsurrey]

Don't you add lemon juice or something similar when making it?

[Jamesey1981]

Al the recipes that I've seen for it are just the dried meat and rendered fat, possibly with the addition of dried fruit and/or nuts, lemon juice would certainly make it taste nicer, but I don't know if there's a reason why you don't add it, maybe some people do and I just haven't seen it, but it could be that it's just not traditional, or it could be that it would affect the preservation of it by introducing too much water, maybe someone else can answer that one, although personally I like it just as it is but with some really sour dried cranberries in it.
One thing that I'm sure would work without a problem is making Biltong rather than jerky for it, as that has an acid cure rather than a salt cure, so that should introduce some acid to cut through the grease flavour wise, but there shouldn't be enough left that it would affect the shelf life if it does cause an issue.
Lots of guesses and only a little knowledge in this post, so obviously don't take what I'm saying as gospel, and for anyone that's reading that knows different please do chime in, it would be interesting to know.

[preparedsurrey]

The recipe I saw was for arctic exploration, maybe it was to help with vitamin c?

[Jamesey1981]

I would think that if you're making it for arctic exploration that you could put whatever you like in it as the low temperature would stop it spoiling anyway.
As for adding vitamin c, you're probably right there, I know the dried fruits were traditionally added to help prevent scurvy and make it into a more complete food. Amuses me that the First Nation people that invented things like this knew about vitamins and diet so long before we did in the "civilised" world, we had already forgotten most of our ancient knowledge by then.

There's an old story about Captain James Cook, don't know how true it is but it's a nice story anyway. He noticed that German sailors didn't suffer from scurvy, and the only difference in diet between his crew and the German crews was sauerkraut, he knew that he'd never get his men to eat strange foreign food, so he got a load of barrels of sauerkraut and stashed them down in the hold labelled "For Officers Use Only", the level of the sauerkraut in the barrels diminished a little every day, and none of his crew got scurvy.

[Plymtom]

I was thinking of an alternative to high sugar stuff being diabetic, and the portable element for a get home scenario, I tried with some mince beef and blueberries, which could have done with being drier, but as it is an experiment mainly for the flavour test and only about 300g of it how long it will keep is not going to be an issue, I tried dehydrating blueberries but they went mouldy so I bought some which like I said were not really dry enough IMO, we have a vitamix blender which did the job after trying the kenwood and the coffee grinder thing first, the vitamix is a beastie which actually heats the stuff up from shear friction if you let it go too long It's a selling point for doing smooth soups, a serious piece of kit, much like the Excalibur dehydrator which we got for jerky ( you could easily break the bank with that stuff) now gets most use drying cases after cleaning in an ultrasonic thing ( which is another serious piece of kit).

I'm going out to play today but will try the Pemmican which is in a foil tray in the fridge and report back, oh almost forgot - I made some hard tack too which I stuck in the spare shelves in the dehydrator after I baked it, I tried one of them and figured out that an anvil and a ball pein hammer may be useful, seriously these things came out like stone chances are they'd make indestructible clay pigeons...they are edible though... with care.

[Plymtom]

Well I never did try the Pemmican, but after making Jerky today I remembered that the Pemmican got vac sealed and frozen, so I have dug it out and put it in the fridge, we'll try a bit tomorrow and reseal it but keep it out, I can barely believe we resisted tasting it for all this time lol.