Pemmican

[Oldcountryboy]

Anyone here ever make any or try any?

[fordson major]

a friend of ours was making bison jerky and over did it, my bro told me and I said "pemmican" but was to late and he and already thrown it out!! I think he did over cook some in another batch but he had eaten it all by the time we got there!!

[tinknal]

Pemmican is very nutritious, but I doubt it is something that one would want to eat (at least in it's original form) unless you were quite hungry, and I'm sure at that point it would taste like manna from heaven.

[TedH71]

I've eaten it. Quite delicious with the berries mixed in.

[PrettyPaisley]

I would love to learn to make it. Seems like the perfect food for when you are starving.

[vicker]

I cooked a whole beef brisket this weekend. After trimming all of the fat off of it, I decided to render the fat , just so I could use a couple of tablespoons in the sauce. I ended up with a quart of rendered beef fat, and I am really surprised at how wonderfully clean it tastes. Try rendering some beef fat. I've rendered venison fat before too. It turns out almost as dense as wax. It has a bit of gaminess, but not bad. Using the venison fat would give you a much firmer product.

[TedH71]

Bear fat used to be rendered into bug spray of sorts by the American Indians. They would spread it on their bodies....no mosquitoes after that.

[HOTW]

I have had pemmican made by my BFF's grandmother, an Algonquin(she supplied the pemmican every year during a specific history lesson) and it was good! She used a mixture of fats, deer meat or a mixture depending on what it was and lots of beries. It really didn't look good but it was tasty! Wish I could remember how it was made.

[Explorer]

A Sioux method. Take three buffalo and several large baskets of berries (any kind will do) and dry. Dry one buffalo (eat the other two while waiting for the meat to dry) and save the fat from all three. Grind the dried buffalo meat and berries, mix with fat then stuff into tubes made of the buffalo hide. Stored in dry ground this will last several years.

[Oldcountryboy]

Originally Posted by PrettyPaisley

I would love to learn to make it. Seems like the perfect food for when you are starving.

My thoughts too! After doing some research of what the native americans ate before the europeans arrival, it sounds like Pemmican was their main food source and is what kept them from starving to death.

From what I gather they dried the meat first and then pounded it into a powder like form. They also dried the berries and nuts and crushed them up and added it to the dried meat powder and then they added just enough rendered fat to make it all stick together.

Supposedly a thousand years and more before the arrival of Europeans the native americans didn't do much gardening and relied mostly on meat, fruits, nuts, and wild greens of differenst sorts. They was suppose to be very healthy back then with strong bones, good teeth, and a very strong immune system. That all started falling apart when corn and other high carb vegetables came into their lives which promoted tooth decay, arthritis, and other ailments. And has really fallen apart after adapting to the Europeans way of diet. (pork, wheat, etc.)