Making Pemmican - The Ultimate Survival Food

Welcome back. Today we are making the Ultimate survival food - Pemmican. This is a great food to know how to make as it is very calorie dense, light weight, packed with protein, has a long shelf life outside of refrigeration, and gives lots of energy.

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[guysandacooler]

That version of Pemmican has a shelf life of +25 years

[DaZebraffe]

To those complaining about how dry and bland it is: That's because it's not supposed to be eaten like a nutrient bar, like this guy did. (Not saying it's wrong to do that, you do you...Just that that's not how it was used by the people who invented it.) It was basically the Native American version of trail rations and, like trail rations, it was meant to be combined with whatever local ingredients you could forage wherever you stopped to eat, to make a proper meal of. In the case of pemmican, it would typically be thrown into a pot of boiling water, with or without some local vegetation for texture and/or flavor, and cooked into a kind of soup.
Edit: 'kay, since it keeps getting said "Oh, so it's like boullion?" I'mma' add in here...Sort of, but it's really more like an MRE, or an instant soup mix.

[ljss]

I'm from Mexico. We use something called alegrias, which are basically just dried fruits (usually raisins), honey, and amaranth. A bar of that will keep you on your feet for hours, and is probably the lightest kind of food you could ever pack. I'm glad to see our friends to the north also developed their own form of travel bar.

[Jaylucky]

Totally like the Rimworld music. Fitting for this video.

[floydsadler]

My people make the same thing but we call it “wasna” and there was a bundle found in a shelter that was estimated to be over 100 years old and the wasna or pemmican was still edible! My relatives used wild choke cherries, wild turnips, buffalo lard and smoked buffalo meat.

[albertawildcat]

Interesting video, many years ago I was part of a volunteer Archeological survey being done on the North Saskatchewan river. One of our volunteers came across an old cache some old fur trader had left buried in the river bank. We dug it out and the archeologist supervising the project said it had been left there about 140 years ago! It had gun powder, shot, knives, hatchets, a couple of traps, some vermillion, flints a tinder box and of course Pemican. Amazingly all were in remarkably good condition and mostly still useable, even the pemican apparently. Everything had been wrapped in animal hide and packed inside a buffalo robe and then in a wooden barrel. One of the guys even tried the pemican...said it tasted ok, I took his word for it.

[johnathancorgan]

Oh, you made a video on pemmican, a subject near and dear to my heart. I've been making it for years, and it's nice to see someone with actual professional skills and equipment doing it. Some notes:

The traditional method used by Native Americans rarely used fruit; they'd slaughter a buffalo, convert as much of the meat and fat to pemmican as they could, then save it in pouches made from the hide. The fruit was added to the recipe later when trading with European fur traders as they were unaccustomed to the lack of flavor.

Also, as you noted briefly, you used hard fat. This is almost essential for shelf stability, as it has the highest amount of saturated fat that resists oxidation and rancidity. I've had the best success with suet or kidney fat, and that's hard to come by for me. Also, the fruit content must be completely dry and powdered for this to work, otherwise residual water will cause spoilage (as you also noted.)

From a nutritional perspective, pemmican makes an excellent part of a ketogenic diet, if made with this in mind. The typical recipe is 50/50 percent by weight of tallow and meat powder (no fruit). This results in a product that has about 70% of its caloric value from fat, 30% from protein, and 0% from carbohydrates. This does result in a greasier, oilier (when eaten) product than some people like, but I've personally found that like any pemmican it is an acquired taste.

Finally, I've never tried it, but I *love* the idea of smoking the meat while drying it! The challenge with pemmican is that you don't really want to cook the meat, you just want to make it devoid of any moisture. The lack of moisture and access to oxygen, as well as the added salt, prevents any sort of bacterial growth, so I'm happy to set the dehydrator at 105F and not worry about trying to get the meat up to more typical cooking temperature.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I love this stuff. It's way too labor intensive, and I wish it were commercially sold the proper way, but the FDA will not allow commercial producers to sell what they would consider raw meat if done properly.

Thanks again for video!

[charitysheppard]

Just a quick cooking hint: I learned this from Asian cooks, and the end result is a little bit cleaner. When rendering their fats, they will do a quick 30-45 sec pre-boil. This coagulates the inter-vascular blood into a foam. That way, you clarify out the blood, which would be too small to catch in your final stages. Pull the fat out, give it a quick drain and rinse, then carry on rendering. I LOVE your slow cooker idea!

[JohnJohn-wrjo]

My grandfather made "pemmican" primarily from deer meat, raisins, dried blueberry, pecans, walnuts, and sunflower seed. Dont recall beef tallow but possibly could have. All of which were gathered vs buying at a store. Probably some other ingredients that I have forgotten since he passed over 50 years ago. I just wished I would have been more interested in how it was made and had the recipie. He would always have a big hunk of it when we spent the day in the woods hunting or on a fishing trip. It was rarely brought out and eaten until all other foods were consumed. It was more of a reserve food if you ran out of everything else and were hungry or needed a pick me up. I had completely forgot about it until I saw your video. Thanks

[richardlorance]

I remember the Pemmican My Maternal Grandmother made when I was a kid (Now I'm 75). There were tons of Wild Chokecherries, Wild Plums and Wild Gooseberries in the breaks around the family farms in Cheyenne County Kansas and Yuma County Colorado. Wild Chokecherries are very sour when eaten directly off the bush. However they are great as an ingredient in things like Pemmican, Jelly and Pancake Syrup. Hard to find in todays supermarkets.

[SjorsHoukes]

“You’re gonna see how easy it is to make”

*commences 18 hour process with 2 types of very particular meat that includes special smoking and drying equipment*

[exudeku]

Me, a warcrimina...uh...a Rimworld Player: Hey, I've seen this before

[Honk]

Even the music fits the Rimworld universe. Great tutorial, gonna have to try this.

[Follower_of_The_Word]

I began making pemmican 43 years ago using a different recipe and it was amazingly good! I used homemade venison jerky and some dried berries. I cut the jerky into small pieces but did not pulverize it. Same for the fruit, leave it whole. Pour rendered tallow over the mixture and form in a cookie sheet in a thin layer. You can taste everything, and it is really good to eat. I think the pulverized stuff has a strange texture and flavors are too blended together.

It’s a shame that saturated animal fats have been so demonized, they are the healthiest fats on earth!

[jojozepofthejungle]

My dad made another survival food from suet mix and dried fruit. He made it every time we went camping, incase something happened to us. He's an ex navy seal lol. All he did on these holidays, was teach us how to survive, we made everything from scratch, ate what we could catch, slept outside, it was quite the adventure.

[PancorRath]

i play a survival game called Rim World and always wondered "the heck is Pemmican?" then just got my survivors making piles of it to live off of until i could get better foods. kinda neat to finally see what i was making them virtually eat now

[jomomma]

Anyone else think it's funny that you have to grease a pan to make cakes pop out easy but when you have a tray full of grease it doesn't pop out easy unless you line it 😂

[AnAZPatriot]

As a small child living amongst the Eskimos, you'd be amazed at how great whipped seal oil mixed with blueberry and a little sugar tastes. We called it Eskimo icecream, and that packs some calories!

[brad]

Growing up in Manitoba, the version we had was just dried/powdered moose, bear fat, and blueberries. There were certainly no apricots, haha.

[SkyNinja]

The perfect food and perfect music to start a organ harvesting colony to.