Anybody ever make pemmican?

[coyote101]

I've read about it for years but had never had any, so I decided to make some to see what it was like. I checked out several recipes on line and settled on a mixture of venison, nuts, berries and beef suet.

I used some back strap from a big doe I shot last week, pecans and walnuts that I had in the fridge, frozen blue berries, and beef suet I got from the local butcher shop.

I sliced the venison very thin and put it and the blue berries on the dehydrator. The venison was very dry and crispy after about five hours, but the berries took much longer. I put the dried meat in a food processor and turned it into meat powder. I also put the nuts into the processor and chopped them pretty fine. The berries ended up pretty small and tough and the processor wouldn't chop them. They just sort of spun around in the thing, so that is how they went into the mixture.

Here are the dry ingredients in a ziplok. Looks a little like granola in the picture, but it's not as course:


I cut the suet into small chunks and put them in a cast iron skillet on medium low heat to melt it down. One it had melted, I put a coffee filter in a wire strainer and poured it through to filter out the solid pieces.

It looks like this. I didn't take a picture, so I borrowed this one from the intenet:


The dry stuff spread out in a container before adding the rendered fat:


I poured the rendered fat over the dry ingredients, mixed it together and spread it evenly in the container. Put it in the fridge to cool and solidify and there you have it.

The finished product. It's hard to describe the taste, but it's not too bad. The berries are a nice burst of flavor.


Pat

[Okanagan]

Looks super nutritious!

I never made any, but ate some when I was a kid that was made by Flathead Indians from somewhere near Kalispell I think. 

Pat said, "It's hard to describe the taste, but it's not too bad."

Not too bad is capable of many meanings depending on voice inflection.    I'd agree that it is not too bad.

Pat, yours looks and sounds better than the real old timey stuff I ate.  They gave us some jerky also, the first I ever ate.  It was lumpy, stringy, greasy and super salty-- none of this tofu teriyaki Manhattan Cajun stuff.





 

[FinsnFur]

We put that in our bird feeder