Making Pemmican - The Ultimate Survival Food

hey everybody we're talking about pemmican today why is pemmican so important why is pemmican that's the question i'll tell you why because it's amazing it's the ultimate survival food simply because it packs a lot of calories it doesn't need to be refrigerated and it doesn't weigh a whole lot pemmican is a food item that has a heavy concentration of protein and fat with an extraordinarily long shelf life pemmican was a staple in the native american culture as they used this pemmican to sustain themselves during the winter months when food was scarce there's a lot of different ways to make pemmican and depending on who makes it the recipe may change slightly in today's video i'm going to show you how to make pemmic from beginning to end we're going to take you through all the steps and you're going to see how easy it is to make this style of food preparation is not common to us and i think it's incredibly important to share food preservation techniques as you never know when you're going to need it let's make pemmican [Music] today we're going to be breaking down the making of pemmican uh into three components the first one is gonna be dried fruit i'm gonna be using blueberries bananas cranberries and apricots this is totally optional as it's not necessary to make pemmican the second ingredient is meat powder now this is necessary it's the base for your pemmican and i'm going to show you how to make meat powder and then the third and final ingredient is gonna be beef tallow you can't use lard for this recipe it's too soft it has a lower melting point and it just doesn't give you the right texture so let's start off by making some tallow we're gonna render some b fat and here's what i did now i can't go to the supermarket and buy already rendered b fat in the form of tallow so i've got to go to my butcher ask him for some hard fat and what we're going to do is we're going to cut that up into small pieces and you can either place this in a food processor or i actually ran it through my grinder with the kidney plate on just to kind of break it up a little bit and fed it into what's going to be the basin of a crock pot now with a little bit of water added on low and i'm just going to go ahead and cover it this particular crock pot is going to run for a couple of hours and it's going to begin to slowly start to render that beef fat and what's going to be left over is going to be my tallow but i want to strain it a couple of times just to get any food particles or any of the fat particles out of it so i'm gonna run it through a strainer once i get that mostly strained i'm gonna have a fairly clean liquid and then i'm gonna run that one more time through a cheesecloth and at this point i've now got my rendered b fat this is going to be the tallow for our project and all i'm going to do is i'm going to place this in the refrigerator in a mold so you can use whatever mold you want i lined it with some cling film so that it can pop out pretty easy and this is what it's going to look like just a couple of hours later it actually hardens up very very fast and we're just going to pop that out of this and cut it up into little chunks so that we can get the beef tallow element of our recipe out of the way the next thing we want to do is cut our meat now using a round steak you know maybe the top round the bottom round is a good cut to use primarily because it's very lean you don't want a fatty cut for this particular project i'm going to go ahead and slice it against the grain and then once i'm finished slicing it i'm going to cut those slices into three-quarter inch strips if you do have a fatty cut try to trim off as much fat as possible what you want is a 100 lean uh for pemmican we're gonna go ahead and put that into a bin and then begin the process of drying it now you could use your oven your dehydrator i'm actually gonna put this in my smoker because traditional pemmican was made over like a campfire and you had a really nice smoky element going on so we're going to use some pecan wood and some applewood combination we're going to be cranking up the bella's cold smoke generator by smoking it because this thing will smoke for easily 10 hours and that's about how long i want to deliver just a nice steady flow of smoke to this particular beef now once i get my smoker up and running i'm going to crank it down just a little bit and then i'm going to make sure that my settings are right in this case the first hour is going to cook at 200 degrees fahrenheit the next 12 hours are going to cook at 165 and what i'm looking for is for my beef to be completely dried crispy i should be able to break it really easy with my hand if it's pliable then it needs to cook even longer and so this is what our very very very dried beef looks like you can see right here i can just bust right into it no problem so now it's time to make the meat powder now you could use a mortar and pestle in this case i'm going to be using my vitamix because i know this thing is going to pulverize that meat and i'm going to stick all that meat in there fill it up and go ahead and crank on the vitamix until it's 100 fluffy meat powder [Music] now that our meat powder is done let's focus on the fruit we need to turn the fruit into a fruit powder so i'm going to dehydrate blueberries i've got you know apricots bananas cranberries i'm going to dehydrate all of that there's the end product and we're going to go ahead and do the exact same thing with all the fruit i'm going to first weigh my fruit so that i can add the right amount to the meat and then i'm going to go ahead and take all of that and just place it directly into my vitamix and let the vitamix do the work if you don't get it chopped up entirely into a powder with the fruit that's completely okay having some small fruit pieces in your pemmican actually provides a favorable texture so that's not that big a deal so as you can see right here i've got like 99 of it into a powder but there are some small pieces and i'm going to leave it just like that because i think it's going to be cool inside the pemmican now that we have our meat and fruit powders made we're just going to go ahead and combine the two so i'm going to take my meat powder and we're going to combine that with the fruit powder and just mix that well to combine as soon as we have that mixed well we're going to add another optional ingredient i'm going to add salt i'm going to add 1.5 salt by the weight of the fruit and the meat powder and that's just going to enhance the flavor a little bit make it more palatable and we're also going to make sure that we mix this well so that everything gets very well incorporated at this point we need to figure out how to bind all of this together and that's where the beef tallow comes in so let's go ahead and weigh out our beef tallow what i want to do is i want to put just enough beef tallow so that it holds together but it's not too oily and that's really the objective here if i don't put enough it's going to be crumbly if i put too much it's going to be too greasy and so we're just going to melt that on a double boiler go ahead and slowly start to add that to our powders and salt and then just mix that well once again to combine and what's going to happen here is the fruit powder and the meat powder are gonna act like a sponge and they're just gonna soak up that liquid beef tallow and because beef tallow already is a little waxy and it hardens very well at room temperature it's gonna bind everything together so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna form this into a little bitty mold i'm gonna pop it in the fridge for no longer than just a couple of hours it doesn't take long for this thing to harden up and then we're gonna go ahead and cut it taste it and i'll let you know what i think [Music] this is what our pemmican looks like now that it's done we could store this in a vacuum seal bag outside a refrigeration it didn't take very long we made five pounds of it in roughly about 18 hours and most of that happened overnight while it was dehydrating let's see what it tastes like it smells amazing beefy smoky you get the different smells coming from the fruits the apricot and the bananas not so much the blueberry one of the biggest complaints that i hear people say when it comes to pemmican is that it's incredibly dry that it's incredibly tasteless it's very hard to eat and so we're gonna see if we were able to overcome those problems with this particular recipe the secret to making good pemmican is no moisture you're basically replacing the moisture with the tallow and that's what gives it such a long shelf life and makes it shelf stable so here we go pemmican [Music] wow it's definitely smoky which adds a nice little touch but it's not overly smoked the salt gives it a really nice sort of enhanced flavor i could see where if you didn't add salt it'd be a little bland the fruit makes a huge difference i mean you get a lot of sweetness coming from the blueberries and coming from you know the bananas and the apricots that tallow really binds those ingredients together forms it into a very easy way so you can eat it it doesn't crumble in your hand and and i thought that it came out amazing it tastes incredible like now granted it is survival food so i probably wouldn't reach for this if i was hungry and i wanted like a late night snack but for something to have that has an enormous shelf life what a cool food item that doesn't weigh a lot packs a ton of calories and it actually tastes really great it's got a great texture too i wasn't expecting it and i think that that's the difference between using lard which is a lot softer has a much lower melting point and tallow which is a little more waxy very smooth coats the mouth goes down really really easy and is incredibly delicious pemmican um i hope you give it a shot

Channel: 2 Guys & A Cooler

Views: 2,881,424

Keywords: jerky, pemmican, survival food, Native American, Bug Out Bags, emergency, smoked meats, food preservation, survival, end times, rimworld

Id: MElMJsIP1Y0

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020