Anybody made any? I want to but don't have/can't afford to buy a dehydrator. I would have to dry my meat at 170 degrees. That's the lowest temp my oven will do.

Hey Jen.. how's it going on the Pemmican. I've been hoping someone would send you a reply, cause I've been wanting to make some myself. It just sounds so yummy to me....I remember my grandmother would make it. I also can't afford a dehydrator......

I have a dehydrator.

I would love to try it !!!

How do you make it?

I will let you know how it turns out.

- Dean

The recipe for it is in the Neanderthin book. Recipe for jerky is there too.

Karen

Cool...my hubbie is finally coming around about our health. He just started Atkins induction today I am sooo happy! And he wants to get a dehydrator now all of a sudden ( I asked for one in March)...he wants to make beef jerky. Jen, if you go to the recipe section I think under quick meals and snacks there is a pemmican recipe that I just found a few days ago. I'm going to try it as soon as I get around to getting the suet from the butcher.

Hi. I hope you found your recipe. I would use the one from the Neanderthin book. Pretty much one part jerky to one part lard. You can add in some dried fruit.

I have the jerky - I bought it. I have some lard but it isn't from a grass fed animal and I thought I'd hold out and look for some that is.

If any one get some made before I do ( I imagine you all will since I'm leaving town for a week and have been moving at a snail's pace on this anyway), tell us all your results!

Thanks for the responses.

I made some pemmican last nite. I dried some deer meat in my dehydrator then I tried to grind it, plugged up the grinder the food processor reduced it to a fine powder. For fat I had some marrow bones in the freezer I baked them in the oven an got about a half a cup of fat.

1 1/2 cup meat powder
1/2 cup marrow grease
1/2 cup coconut oil
1 tsp honey

the only problem the fat never set. I think the coconut oil was the cause, marrow fat sets hard and white I really liked the taste all my buddies didn't. I am going to use beef lobe fat and marrow fat next time, and add dried blueberries. If I don't get a deer will use beef. ( I am all out of deer Good thing they increased the bag limit)

Diane

When I was a kid, I made some, from, I think, an old camping and woodcraft book by either Horace Kephart or Ernest Thompson-Seton. Anyhow, it had crushed oven-dried meat, I got the butcher to give me some tallow, cause he knew that would set hard. Put some sourberries in it (highbush cranberries? chokecherries?) I thought it was good. Kind of made the roof of my mouth greasy, with the tallow. Huntress, if you don't already have it, there's a book called "northern bushcraft" which is really cool. Bill

I made some this summer for my hiking adventures in the Sierras and Cascades. It's truly amazing stuff! My brother and I are ultra-lite backpackers...with Jerky and pemmican, we were able to keep our packs below 17 pounds, total...that's tarp, clothing, food, fishing gear (yeah, now that I'm a hunter and gatherer, I fish..totally!), and everything else, like camera and first aid...etc. We shot past those poor slobs with their fifty to sixty pound packs. They wondered how we could be so lite that it didn't even feel like we were carrying packs. When we told them we ate nothing but home-made pemmican, jerky, and whatever fish we caught, they turned up their poor, worn-out noses and sniffed that they would rather eat that dehydrated crap that gives me a total gas and bowel attack! Poor, uninformed, ignorant city-folk! How silly they are to be eating all of that food that is killing them with their diabetes, cancer, and other auto-immune disorders. They just won't listen, most of 'em. They know a "better way," even though that "better way" is going to do them all in. Not that I will necessarily live to an extremely old age. One thing I do know, though. I will be in better shape, and feel better, physically, while I AM here. Quality of life means more to me than longevity, anyway. And, there is still a chance that I will live longer because I thought to change my woe.

Now, I really love pemmican..it's very fatty...Since I now have a fat-burning metabolism, I love the stuff! I can sit and drink the fat leavings after I take a roast out of the pan...that used to be a big YUK! Now, that is not necessarily a good thing, either, though. Beef fat is high in the bad transfatty acids...omega 6...not good for us. That's because they are grain-fed for the last two weeks of their sorry lives. If they were range-fed, there would be the right percentages of Omega 3 to Omega 6 tranfatty acids. Home-made jerky...without all of the sugar...is great, too. I didn't have deer meat, which would have been better...next year, though. I'm getting a rifle this year and hope to bag one of the cute little Bambis...whenever I see them in the forest, I salivate about all of that meat on the hoof that could be in my stomach! I used to think they were cute. Now, I see FOOD! I see a lot of them where I live, in the Oregon Cascades. Someday, I hope to be proficient in using the bow...but, for now, I will blow them away with a high-powered rifle! Not that I want to kill them for the sport...I think that is highly wasteful and not in keeping with my natural environment or my place in the food chain. Nope! I want to eat them, when I get hungry! I even plan to thank them for getting in my sights, so I can eat them. That's what many of the "primitives" do. I wonder who is really "primitive and savage." I thank each fish that gets on my line. If he gets away, I just figure it wasn't his time to become food on my platter. I used to have a problem with clubbing them on their little noggins. Not anymore. I don't want them to suffer, if they are going to become food for me. I don't need the bad chemicals of their suffering, anymore than they need to suffer. I think I've spouted off for long enough. Would love to have this thread pick up and become a little more energetic.

captxray,

could you please tell how you made the Jerky and pemmican? i would appreciate it. i just got a dehydrator. did you use one to make either? i too am a light backpacker. i know that water and food is the main weight on any trip. so please give the steps to make these... thanks! i too want to get a rifle and start deer hunting.

i know what you mean about drinking fat. i can never get enough fat. what do you think is the best source of animal fat... i really want to up my intake! i have resorted to using butter and cheese, but really want to get away from both.

Dean

Hello,
I just dropped into this forum to look around. I saw the pemmican post and I thought you all might enjoy this site:
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/C...7/Pemmican.html
It has a ton of recipes, some applicable, some not. Quite a few of them looked like they would work for Paleo/NT.
Enjoy!

This thread about pemmican has me excited, 'cause I'd sort of forgotten about it, haven't really found the perfect food for canoe trips, hikes, whatever. Atkins bars work, keep me going, don't raise blood sugar, but you could never call them NATURAL, you know. Have tried Spam, Corned Beef, brazilian canned roast beef, but they are awfully salty, and then there's those cans to pack out, and in bear country who wants a sack of spam cans in your camp? Will get out my dehydrator and get to work. Also, I make sausage with my dad, and he says when he was young, they smoked it so much, refridgeration was unnecessary, they just hung it in the attic or the tankhouse. Well, sausage that has been smoked that much, is perhaps a lot like pemmican, a casing filled with cured meat and fat - his dad liked his sausage fat, put in extra fat along with the meat from their hogs. I wish I knew how to tell when it was safely cured, wouldn't want to get the mollygrobbles out on the trail. I will try to research this, there are some books on curing meats, or perhaps some of you already know. One thing for sure, you can't really live on that freeze dried stuff. I shared with some of you my story about being in the Brooks range, meeting a kind of hermit up there, he had shot a caribou with his .22, had 2 skillets going over his woodstove, we must have eaten most of that caribou that night, just the six of us. We could feel the difference between real food and empty calories. Bill

Hey Alaskaman,
Alaska Mill and Feed used to have a good selection of sausage making supplies and books. You might want to try there. I'm sure the Extension has pamphlets on curing meat too. The trick will be finding recipes that do not use chemicals. I'm sure that there are published methods that are natural.
I believe that all of my source material uses nitrates and the like. I will look through them and see what I can find. I tend to collect tradional/old fashioned based homemaking books. The trick is that a lot of these chemicals have been being used for a hundred years or so.
We shall see.

My Father was 1/2 Cherokee Indian & 1/2 Swedish and he used to make pemmican when he'd go visit his Dad down in Tennessee. My brother has the recipe and has made it when he lived in Pennsylvania from White tail Deer Meat.

I just don't think it would taste the same from beef. Venison has a sweet flavor to it. My brother is coming out hopefully for christmas and so I'm going to ask him to make it for me and show me how to make it.

coconut oil is only hard in cold conditions so it would definitely throw off the hardness of the other fats

Hi, Dean.

I just followed the incredibly simple recipes for both in Ray Audet's book, "Neanderthin." While I have a dehydrator that I use for fruits and vegetables, I will NEVER use it for curing meat! I don't care what THEY say. There are too many little beasties that show up in our meat. I know. My wife's family owns a packing plant. Not necessarily a place to go, if you get the squeamies. I've watched the vet stuffing his hands into the globs they call organs and such and pulling out awful looking stuff from some of the animals...I just think about the ones that the vet doesn't find. So, therefore, I use my oven on a higher temperature than a dehydrator can take it...(about 170 degrees) that's to kill the little worms, and bugs and stuff. Really makes you want to go have a rare steak, huh? I have a feeling that Mankind started to live longer after he or she (most-likely "she"...women seem to be more attuned to cool stuff like getting inventive with food...we men will just l sit and eat the same old crap because it's there...I know that sounds sexest, and there are men who don't feel this way, but I go by experience) found out about cooking meat. I know all about those great enzymes and stuff, but I would rather be safe than dead...or, at least incredibly sick...you see, I've been there, too...from tainted turkey ala King...Don't ever want to go there, AGAIN!!!!

The stuff worked great on our hiking, this summer. I ate fish until I thought I would explode...we caught 52 golden trout in one lake! Used barbless hooks and threw most of them back, but we definetly had a fish fry on our primitive pans...The pemmican satiates the hunger pangs...even on a strenuous hike...it doesn't take much, either. And the recipe I used stays hard enough (at the bottom of the pack and in the middle), wrapped in wax paper. If I had left the pack out in the sun, or it had been really hot, I think it would have melted, but we had pretty good luck with it. It was kind of neat as we hiked over a pass that was originally first traversed by the Yosemite Indians on their trading journies to visit the Mono Indians...and, here we were, eating what they ate on the same trail, a couple of hundred years ago.