Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (2024)

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Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (1)

European explorers learned all kinds of things from Native Americans. Fish as fertilizer, the three sisters gardening method, and the process of making pemmican. The word comes from the Algonquin language known as Cree and the direct translation is rendered fat.

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Because of the translation, you should understand that the basic ingredients of any pemmican recipe are meat and fat. Things like honey, fruits, nuts, and seasonings are added as well, for the most part, you are making a dried meatball that is preserved in its own fat. Some people also use bacon drippings for flavor.

In this how-to article, we are going to create our own pemmican and I will walk you through the steps. I will also provide you with some variant recipes that are delicious.

Recipe for Pemmican

Ingredients:

  • 2 lbs Quality Grass Fed Beef or Game Meat
  • ½ Cup Lard
  • 2 Tbsp Honey
  • ¼ Cup of Walnuts
  • About 8 dried apricots

Tools:

  • Deep pan to dry beef
  • Smaller pan to dry fruits
  • Food processor or Mortar and Pestle
  • Large mixing bowl
  • Wooden spoon

Directions:

STEP 1

It’s very important to take a sharp knife and slice that meat as thin as you can. The thinner your meat, the better to start with. This will all pay off when the time comes to break that meat down.

If you are making pemmican with a very sparse kitchen, limited skills, and merely for survival, I would recommend using a nice fatty ground beef. Otherwise, you can use very thin slices of beef and dry them in the same way.

I am using local grass-fed ground beef that is 80/20 fat to meat. Of course, I want to use the rendered fat for our pemmican, but you will need to add lard.

STEP 2

Spread the meat out thinly on a baking sheet or a perforated cooking sheet. I use one with high sides, so I can capture all that great fat coming off the meat. I like to salt the meat when I dry it in the oven as well. Just a light sprinkle across the meat. This also adds the preserving qualities of salt. It’s not necessary, but I do it.

Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (2)

STEP 3

Dry this meat in the oven on the lowest setting for 8 hours or however long it takes. If you are using ground beef, you will have to drain the fat at some point. Don’t throw that fat away. You need to save it for a later part of the process. Most people use thinly sliced meat and that is the classic method, but I find that ground beef gets you to the pulverized state faster.

STEP 4

Grind the meat down as fine as possible. I recommend using a food processor. This is a very important part of the process. By doing this, you will be able to get maximum coating from the rendered fat. You want the rendered fat to cover the meat and the meat to fill out all of the added fat. There should not be a layer of melted fat floating above your meat.

STEP 5

Now pour the rendered fat onto the dried meat and mix it up. The pemmican mix should look like a ragu or a thick sauce. If you add too much fat you are going to have to strain some of it out. This is very important. Too much fat will make your mix inedible.

Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (3)

STEP 6

The fat that you poured off your ground beef can now be mixed back into the dried meat. Add the lard as well and stir everything.

At this point, stir in any dried fruit or nuts. For this recipe, stir in the chopped walnuts and the apricots. Stir everything very thoroughly.

Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (4)

STEP 7

Let the mix cool to room temperature. From here you can store it in many ways. We are going to use an ice cube tray to portion them out and then roll them into balls. You can also create loaves in a pan or small bricks in a ziplock bag.

Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (5)

Variant Recipe Additions

  1. Add chopped dried apricots and cherries.
  2. Add lots of black pepper and raisins.
  3. Add soy sauce to the meat while drying, then crushed peanuts and ginger.

Conclusion

The store shelves are riddled with all types of granola and energy bars that are very popular. These bars often find a place in the backpacks of the modern adventurer. You see, pemmican is old news. While it is making a resurgence in survival circles, this fatty meat mix was probably given up when people started having concerns about things like cholesterol and heart attacks. We ran from fatty red meat for years and it was all due to bad science.

The great news is that fat is back! We know that it’s an essential ingredient in running a healthy human machine. For men, fat is incredibly important in terms of testosterone production. Because of this, we can enjoy those red meats and healthy fats again.

The irony in all of this is that pemmican was abandoned for sugary granola bars on the trail. Now we know that sugar was an under-the-radar killer being sold to the American public as a delicious treat. Turns out we should have been eating more meat and fat the whole time!

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Simple and Delicious Pemmican Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the best meat to use for pemmican? ›

You can use either ground meat or solid meat that you slice. When using solid meat, get the cheaper cuts but also one's which are less fatty. Although we definitely like the fat, the fat is best added after the lean meat is dried and pulverized. This will make the pemmican with the best shelf life.

What is the ratio of fat to meat in pemmican? ›

The pânsâwân was then spread across a tanned animal hide pinned to the ground, where it was beaten with flails or ground between two large stones till it turned into very small pieces, almost powder-like in its consistency. The pounded meat was mixed with melted fat in an approximate 1:1 ratio by weight.

What spices are best for pemmican? ›

Today I pulled all the pemmican out of the freezer, thawed it, heated it to a soft, melty mixture, and added a bunch of spices, all dried, of course: garlic salt, oregano, onion, black pepper, cayenne, six pepper mix, beef bullion, chives, and what ever else I could find! The resulting mix was darn tasty!

Should you add salt to pemmican? ›

Add salt at a rate of 1.5-1.9% of the total weight of your powders used. For the original recipe, your mix will only be meat/salt. For a dried fruit mix, start with 30% dried fruit and 70% meat powder. Increase sweetness to taste by increasing the fruit powder or by adding honey.

How long can you live off pemmican? ›

He wrote: “Of all foods that I am acquainted with, pemmican is the only one that, under appropriate conditions, a man can eat twice a day, for three hundred and sixty-five days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first...

Can you use bacon grease in pemmican? ›

You'll need a minimum of ½ cup of rendered fat (I used a blend of bacon fat and coconut oil) and you'll want it to be hot so that it doesn't start solidifying on you while mixing. Mix in the hot, rendered fat. A mixer works great here. A blender can easily get overwhelmed by this combination.

Can you use butter for pemmican? ›

Do not substitute a soft fat such as lard, bear fat, duck, or goose fat, Crisco or butter. The denser and more saturated the fat, the better. Combine powdered meat and berries, pouring melted tallow until coated. The ratio is flexible, but I use roughly four parts meat, three parts berries, and two parts fat.

Is pemmican bad for you? ›

Is pemmican good for you? When made with grass-fed meat, tallow, and other fresh ingredients, yes! Because pemmican has high concentrations of lean meat and fat, it is considered a high-calorie, high-protein, and high-fat snack. When it isn't combined with fruit, pemmican is essentially no-carb.

How much pemmican per person per day? ›

Pemmican (One Pound of pemmican per day) Go here to learn how to make your own. Pemmican is the best backpacking staple because there is nothing that can compare to nutrient density. Pemmican is power packed with healthy animal fats mixed with dried pulverized meats and berries.

Can you use Crisco to make pemmican? ›

Ingredients. Lard (to hold together) Do not use shortening or butter.

Can you use nuts in pemmican? ›

Pemmican ingredients varied widely, but they always included lean venison or buffalo meat mixed with fat. Some pemmican recipes also incorporated dried berries and nuts for added flavor and nutrition.

Can you put sugar in pemmican? ›

Take 1 pound of finely ground jerky Add 4 tablespoons of finely ground or powdered dried fruit, berries or herbs (such as sage, cherries or blueberries) Add sugar to taste if sweet pemmican is desired Mix in just enough lard (such as Crisco) to hold the dried ingredients together.

Can you survive on pemmican alone? ›

So long as you have a plastic bag or even just a clean, cool place to store this food, you can eat it for as long as you might need to survive. Pemmican is filling. The Indigenous people of North America could survive on pemmican alone for an entire winter because the food is so filling in such small quantities.

Can you make pemmican without berries? ›

Marrow and dried berries were only sometimes added, and most sources say fur traders preferred their pemmican without berries. This makes sense when looking at how pemmican was actually eaten—most often cooked with other ingredients and rarely eaten raw.

How do you make pemmican step by step? ›

Heat rendered fat on stove at medium until liquid. Add liquid fat to dried meat and dried fruit, and mix in nuts and honey. Mix everything by hand. Let cool and store.

What meat is pemmican made of? ›

Pemmican (Creepimikan, meaning "manufactured grease") is dried meat, traditionally bison (moose, caribou, venison or beef can be used as well), pounded into coarse powder and mixed with an equal amount of melted fat, and occasionally saskatoon berries, cranberries, and even (for special occasions) cherries, currants, ...

Why does pemmican not go rancid? ›

There's almost no water in it. Pemmican is made by slowly dehydrating meat (usually bison) over a slow fire until it's rock hard like jerky. The jerky is then pulverized into a powder. The powder is then mixed with rendered fat (which also has been heated to remove the water).

Can you make pemmican with store bought beef jerky? ›

One of the two primary ingredients for making pemmican is dried meat, as in dried beef or venison jerky. You can use store-bought jerky, but if it's very pliable it means there is residual moisture and moisture can make foods spoil.

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