How to make Low Tech Pemmican - Survival food that lasts over 25 years

hey everybody welcome to the channel my name is eric and in today's video i'm going to show you how to make a low-tech version of pemmican using no modern appliances heck we're not even going to use electricity pemmican is a native american survival food that packs a lot of calories and is shelf stable it has an enormous shelf life the shelf life of pemmican completely depends on how you make it if you render your suet properly and you only stick with beef and fat you can have a pemmican that can easily last you 20 30 years some say even 50 years when stored in an airtight container in a cool dark place one last thing i want to say before we make this low-tech version of pemmican is that if you actually think you're going to need pemmican don't wait and make it make it right now with the tools and the conveniences that you have at this very moment if you wait until you're in a survival situation to try and make pemmican this is a relatively challenging recipe to make with that being said let's make pemmican [Music] to make pemmican we need to prepare our meat for drying we're using lean beef in this recipe but you could use elk bison venison just make sure that it's lean and when you're finished this is what it should look like no silver skin no fat on it and once you have it like that go ahead and cut your meat into slices against the grain the objective here is to dry our meat as quickly as we can so you're going to want to pound your meat with a stick or a meat pounder so that it is paper thin and if you happen to rip it during this process that's okay the thinner the better we're just going to take that once it's completely pound flat and we're going to paste it on a drying rack [Music] now that our meat is paper thin let's go ahead and dry it and oh by the way i forgot to mention at the end of this video i'm going to show you how to cook a dinner with this pemmican so be sure to stick around for that there's a couple ways to dry your meat drying option number one is the sun now we're going to take our drying trays and we're going to go to the roof of our house we have a hot tin roof a clear sunny day it's nice and breezy perfect conditions to dry our raw meat we're just going to put some mosquito netting around some cinder blocks to keep any bugs mosquitoes any critters away from our raw meat and we're going to let this hang out all day this works really great in areas of the country where it's hot with low humidity our meat's been drying for roughly about 10 hours and it's still not cracker dry so we're going to take our meat down from the roof and just place it in our kitchen until the very next morning if i leave it out overnight the humidity throughout the night is a lot higher and i think there's a good chance it may rain so we're going to bring it in overnight and the next morning 7 30 in the morning we're gonna go ahead and put it back on the roof we're projected to have another nice sunny day on day number two of drying so we've got 10 hours from yesterday we brought it inside now we're on day number two i rotated the trays it's a nice breezy day outside i want to make sure that all the pieces dry evenly and i checked on them about every hour and a half roughly each time we rotated the grates around we flipped the meat over and because it was paper thin after about 15 hours of actual dry time this meat is completely done so let me at least talk about a drying option number two which is fire if you build a small campfire the radiating heat around the fire will not only dry your meat but it's also going to give it a nice smoky flavor you do want to rotate your trays and turn your meat around for this process as well just so that it dries evenly but as soon as it's dried we're going to take our meat inside to finish the process a little test to know if it's finished that if you bend your meat with your fingers it should immediately crack if it's flexible in any way you need to continue drying it until it becomes cracker crispy so let's put all that to the side and grab our mortar and pestle and this is what we're going to use to take our meat and turn it into a powder this process can be a little time consuming and requires a lot of energy if you don't have a mortar and pestle you could use two rocks and your end result should be somewhat of a coarse powder [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] this is what our meat powder should look like it's coarsely ground it looks great it's now time to add our rendered beef suet beef suet is the fat around the kidneys on the count we typically buy quite a bit of beef suet at a time from our butcher we render it down because it keeps great outside of refrigeration and it works beautifully for making soap and candles so we tend to have this all the time we're going to go ahead and melt some of this rendered beef suet over an open fire and as soon as it's mostly melted we're going to bring it in the kitchen so that we can finish this process the rest of this recipe is actually very easy we're going to mix as best we can because we're going to eyeball it here but equal portions of fat with our meat powder so if you want to be super precise and you have a kitchen scale weigh out your meat powder and then whatever that weighs out to add that same weight in rendered suet our pemmican is officially done we've got equal parts fat to powdered meat and at this point you can form it into balls put it into a mold make little strips out of it because tallow at room temperature will naturally harden so i'm just going to take it form it into a rectangle on some wax paper and let it sit on my countertop for you know one or two hours after it's hardened up i'll cut it and place it into vacuum sealed bags store it in a cool dark place where it'll be available to eat in the event that i need it and that's how you make pemmican now let me show you how to cook with pemmican you can make soups with it you can make stews with it depending on what you're working with as far as ingredients go you could just eat it by itself which is what we're going to do here in just a second and i'm going to share with you my thoughts on how this pima can taste but as you can see it's easy to cut it's easy to break apart i mean it's just meat bound together with rendered fat so you can just break it apart pretty easy and this piece right here i think we're going to give it a little taste pimping let's see what it tastes like [Music] you know there's not really a lot going on with this particular pemmican there's no sweetness coming from it we didn't add any salt so it's relatively bland it kind of tastes exactly as you would expect it to taste which is unseasoned dried meat the tallow leaves somewhat of a waxy coating in your mouth so you know at a certain point it gets a little difficult to to chew and swallow the texture is okay the powder was a little more coarse than our original pemmican but other than that it's a relatively simple food item so why don't we go ahead and cook with it and see what it's like inside of a dish there are a lot of different ways to cook with pemmican and what pemmican is going to do to your dish is add a beautiful beefy flavor it's going to rehydrate that beef and act almost like a bouillon cube so we're going to saute some onions leeks we're going to add some carrots and we're going to cook this in some rendered beef tallow until the carrots and the leeks and the onions begin to take on a little bit of color this is going to add a lot of flavor and a little sweetness to our dish so once we've got a little color on our onions and carrots we're going to go ahead and add our celery mushrooms our crumbled pemmican our cabbage and our garlic and we're going to continue to saute that in that rendered beef tallow [Music] we're going to season this with some kosher salt a little black pepper and we also have some smoked paprika and some dried tomato powder that we made it's going to give it some nice flavor and it's going to help thicken it up just a tiny little bit and then we're going to add some red chili flakes as well as some coriander powder to finish the recipe we're going to add some tomatoes our green cauliflower and about three quarts of water and we're just going to bring this to a simmer on a medium medium-high heat before we add our noodles now if you don't have noodles you could serve it with rice you could add potatoes that would make a great addition you can even add beans to this dish and it would just help bulk it up a little bit we ended up using about eight ounces of pemmican to make this particular hearty vegetable noodle soup and it ended up feeding about six people and some of you have asked what the nutritional value for pemmican is well it depends on how you make it if you make this recipe for every pound of pemmican or 16 ounces you're going to get 4617 calories 258 grams of protein and 390 grams of fat our soup is done it smells absolutely amazing and what i want to do is i want to taste the broth first to see if that pemmican actually made that big of a difference let's see what the broth tastes like that's nice it's not overly beefy a little sweet the broth and that's in part because of the vegetables but you could definitely tell that there's beef in the dish as it was broken up so finally every spoonful has got a little bit of pemmican in it as far as flavor goes there is a lot going on in this vegetable noodle soup let's taste this so tasty this soup is hearty it's jam-packed with flavor it's beefy and we only had to use a little bit of pemmican to feed a lot of people thanks for watching the video if you got any questions on how to make pemmican leave them in the comments section below and if you're new to the channel we'd like to say welcome don't forget to subscribe like comment and share we post new videos each week we'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: 2 Guys & A Cooler

Views: 359,167

Keywords: pemmican, survival food, rimworld, native american food, how to make pemmican, how to make survival food, how to dry meat safely, how to make beef jerkey

Id: xik1arbTPRk

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021