In this blog I want to show you how I made some food stuff that I will be taking with me on my expedition to Sweden. This food stuff is the amazing Pemmican.
Pemmican is basically dried, ground meat mixed with animal fat, however it is a perfect food stuff for cold climates where the body needs a good source of fats and proteins. Firstly let me give you a little history about pemmican.
Pemmican is a concentrated mixture of fat and protein used as a nutritious food. Historically, it was an element of Canadian cuisine in certain parts of the country. The word comes from the Cree word pimîhkân, which itself is derived from the word pimî, "fat, grease". It was invented by the native peoples of North America, who would air dry meat, pound it to powder with stones and mix with animal fat. Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Roald Amundsen.
There are also many much more recent historical records of pemmican being used and being the “superfood” of the time and the best option for ultimate nutritional value.
Many polar or arctic explorations relied on the use of pemmican not just to feed the men on those expeditions but also the dogs. It was found that “dog pemmican”, made from beef and not actually dog meat, which was classed as lower quality pemmican to be fed to the dogs was too high in protein for the dogs and not the best form of feed for them. There is even an account of members of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1916 expedition to the Antarctic resorting to eating dog pemmican when they were stranded on ice for the winter, doing them much more benefit than feeding it to the dogs.
If like me, you read many of the older books on outdoors travel, camping and woodcraft, such as Nessmuk’s Woodcraft & Camping or Horace Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft or Ellsworth Jaeger’s Wildwood Wisdom you will find they all mention the virtues of pemmican. Even today it can be found mentioned and held in high regard in books such as Ray Mears’s Northern Wilderness, Bushcraft & Survival and Out on the Land. And as I have mentioned previously the book I have been referring to for much of my travel information, A Snow Walkers Companion, Garrett & Alexandra Conover. With all these older and more recent books singing its praises it just seemed the logical choice for me to have a go at making this to take with me.
The basis is always a dried meat mixed with animal fat. Traditionally this would have been Bison, Elk or Deer meat air dried and then ground using stones and mixed with rendered animal fat (tallow) usually from the animal the meat came from. Later versions saw the addition of dried fruits and berries to add flavour and carbohydrates. For my version I am using beef steak, blueberries, cranberries, nuts and beef dripping. I am also using modern kitchen appliances such as a dehydrator and a food blender apposed to air drying and grinding the meat with stones.
Ingredients List:
- 1lb lean beef steak
- 2 small punnets fresh Blueberries (approx. 500g)
- 1 bag dried Cranberries & Macadamia nuts (250g)
- Beef dripping 250g
- Sea Salt
- Ground Black pepper
- Soy sauce
- Worcestershire sauce
- Ginger
- Garlic
- Cinnamon
- A“dash” of whiskey
To start with I bought a large steak, some fresh blueberries and I had a bag of dried cranberries and macadamia nuts. I trimmed much of the fat off the steak as this helps with the drying process. I then cut it into very thin slices; you can partially freeze the meat to help you cut it very thinly. This was going to be my dried beef or jerky. I made up a marinade sauce for this to soak in overnight. The marinade is basically a recipe I have used before to make jerky that I find to my taste, it may not be to yours. If in doubt just use salt, pepper and a bit of Worcestershire sauce. Mine has a few other ingredients in, in dashes and sprinkles. You can see the ingredients in the photo but to meet your tastes its best to experiment and find a mix you like. Put the thin strips of meat into a zip lock bag, add your marinade and then give it a good shake and mix it all together, place it in the fridge and leave overnight.
Whilst your meat is marinating, I put a sheet of baking paper on my dehydrator shelf (to stop the berries falling through) and put the blueberries in and switched them on to dehydrate overnight. In the morning they were still not quite ready but the meat had marinated nicely, so I put the meat onto 3 dehydrator trays and left the berries on the top one to go back in a bit longer. In the meantime I put the bag of dried cranberries and nuts in the food blender and blitzed it.
When the meat and blueberries were dried fully I blitzed these separately in the blender too. The meat took quite a while to break down to a fine powder, I sharpened the cutting blade on the blender which seemed to help somewhat, but take your time and make sure you grind the meat down nice and fine. Once done I placed all the dried ingredients into a large mixing bowl and mixed them well together.
I then put my beef dripping, chopped up, into a pan to melt slowly. Take care not to overheat this, you just want it to melt and not start to cook. Once the dripping was melted and the dry mix all blended together I poured the melted dripping slowly into the dry mix and combined it all together with a wooden spoon. Don’t use your hands as you are pouring hot fat in this mix and it will burn you. Make sure the mixture is well mixed together, not leaving any dry areas. You want this to be a firm and moist throughout but not a sloppy mix.
Once fully mixed together I spooned it out into a baking tray. If you line the baking tray with greaseproof paper it will help the easy removal when the mix has set. Flatten and smooth the mix out as much as possible trying to make it nice and evenly spread out. Now just allow this to cool and set. Once set I cut it into blocks using a pizza slice wheel. I took it out of the tray and bagged it in a ziplock bag, after trying a small bit of course. I think it is an acquired taste, it’s certainly not unpleasant and I can see the massive benefits this food will provide in the cold environment it’s going to be used. It is not something I would sit and eat the whole bag in one go, like I can with jerky. It can be eaten straight or mixed in with cooking to form a fatty gravy but it’s perfect for providing those much needed calories and fuel when out in the cold.
