Pemmican: An Experiment in Preserving Meat

When I wrote Prepper’s Livestock Handbook, I researched off-grid meat preservation methods and came up with quite a few. What surprises me now, is that I didn’t think of pemmican. Pemmican is one of those things I recall reading about in grammar school history lessons about Native Americans and the early English and French explorers. I’m not sure why it didn’t come to mind when I did my research for that book. 

I was reminded of pemmican when I was watching videos to pass the time while I shelled pole bean and turnip seeds for next year’s garden. I subscribe to two historical cooking YouTube channels, and I ran across pemmican videos on both. Off-grid food preservation interests to me, so I did a little more research and decided to give it a try.

What is pemmican? It’s dried meat, traditionally made from buffalo bison or venison. After it’s dried (typically by the sun or campfire), it’s powdered and mixed with melted suet or tallow. Sometimes, it contains dried fruit, but sometimes not. It’s shelf stable, which means it doesn’t require refrigeration for storage. That makes it ideal for long trips, when hunting or stopping at the convenience store isn’t possible. It’s a concentrated source of protein and calories, and because it’s fully cooked, it can be eaten as is (which is why it’s often thought of as a survival food), or as an ingredient in soup, stew, or hash. 

The ingredients are simple: lean raw meat and suet or tallow. Since dried fruit is optional, I opted for a plain version. Here’s the process in pictures.

Pemmican is different from jerky in several ways. One is that it is cut cross grain instead of with the grain. Jerky is highly seasoned and dried until it’s pliable. Pemmican is not seasoned and is dried until crisp. 

If suet is used, it needs to be rendered, i.e. melted to remove non-fat bits. If it’s made from pig fat it’s called lard. If it’s made from cow, sheep, or goat, it’s called tallow. My blog post on rendering tallow is here. Since I already had it, I just had to melt it to mix with the finely ground dried meat.

Of course, we sampled it, and it wasn’t what I expected. I watched a number of prepper videos where they sample it and think it’s extremely bland and tasteless. Nobody seemed to care for it much and thought it’s best use was for survival food. Dan and I thought it just tasted like beef. Not terribly greasy, and it could have used some salt, but the flavor was fine.