Pemmican How To

afternoon folks i'm dave canterbury with self-reliant software in the pathfinder school what i thought we'd do today is discuss a recipe to make pemmican we made pemmican in the last bushcraft 101 course we processed a whitetail deer and then we made jerky from the meat dried the meat over a fire and then we ground that meat and created pemmican so what is pemmican pemmican was a high-protein high-fat trail food that was used back in the day especially during the hudson bay trapping era and even prior to that it was generally made from buffalo beef and buffalo tallow later it was made from beef and beef towel and could also be made from deer and deer tallow or you could mix the meat with a different type of tallow if you had an abundance of that so what we're going to do today is we're going to use beef tallow and we're going to use venison for our meat so generally what you do is you would first make jerky from the meat drying it over a fire until there was no moisture left in the meat it was dried out typical jerky then you would pulverize or grind that meat into a fine powder almost like a sawdust to make blocks or rolls or balls of what was called pemmican so you would have a solid mass that you could eat chunks off of on the trail that would not need refrigeration would not spoil it had infinite shelf life for the most part because you were using nothing but natural dried meats and natural tower as time went by people started to mix things with this concoction like fruits dried fruits dried nuts sometimes they mixed honey to make it a little bit sweeter because again honey has a pretty much forever shelf life and so you could mix all those things together and then make these balls or bars of trail food and today that's still a very very viable source of a very nutritious high concentration and calories trail mix so what we're going to do today is i'm going to show you how to make that what we need is we need some kind of tallow and i've got beef tallow here right off amazon you can buy it by the container you don't want lard you want tallow and there is a difference between the two now i've got some jerky here that i made in my dehydrator we used all the jerky that we made in the class so i made another round of jerky in my dehydrator at the house if you've got a dehydrator for the meat and you've got some kind of a food processor like a ninja which is what i use it makes this process really quick and easy so you dehydrate the meat first any fruits and things that you want you dehydrate those as well and then you're going to take that material and you're going to put it into a ninja processor and you're going to create a powder from that which i'll show you directly here in a minute of the meat and then you're going to powder whatever else you're going to put in there i've got walnuts and i've got dried apples here so we're going to use those three ingredients along with our tallow can make our pemmican today now the first thing we're gonna need to do is we're gonna need to melt some of this tallow into some kind of a pan we don't want it boiling and really hot all we want is it melted down we're gonna use a stove for that i've got the new pathfinder multi-fuel stove here with white gas in the bottle white gas or gasoline is always a better fuel in the winter time because those iso cans tend to freeze up almost immediately when you light them they don't work very well at all so if you've got a stove that you can use those tanks on in the summertime and then some kind of a pressurized tank of fuel on in the winter time you've got a very multi-functional stove here we're going to take some of this beef towel we're going to melt it in this pan and then we've got a mold here and this is just a soap mold you could use any kind of a mold for this if you want to some kind of a silicone muffin pan would work fine for this and we're just going to get our mixture in our pan mixed up the way we want it then we're going to spread it out in this mold let it set up let it solidify again and cut it into bars and wrap those individually to put into our kit for the trail turn in here a little bit here again we don't need this thing to be overly hot [Music] and it's kind of a guesstimate on how much of this you need so you're just going to have to go with it as you can this is all natural it's not going to hurt jimmy you can use it for lots of other things as well [Music] all right so we just added our walnuts in here now and i can already tell that we're going to need a little bit more liquid in here and that's fine so we'll just kind of scoot this off to the side bang this off and we'll put a little more tallow in there just like that get that melted down a little bit don't take long we can turn it back down mix all that up you want to get all of that saturated you don't want any standing pools of tallow in there at all you want to get all that nice and mixed together everything should look damp but it shouldn't look ringing wet either i guess that's the best way to describe that now we've got that we're going to put our apples in here and that's going to be the final step is to put those in those clumps are just powder that's kind of clumped together i'm going to start to mix that in real good and again we're just eyeballing how much ratio of tallow we're putting in here it's almost like our glue we want it to glue everything together to make this solid but we don't so much want so much of it in there that we're just eating big balls of fat either what i should have when i'm done is i should be able to grab this and it should clump together in a ball just like that if i've got that i'm in pretty good shape now while this is still in a liquid state this tallow because it's warm we want to get this in our mold all right so now we just want to start scooping this out of the pan and into the bottom of the mold just like this get everything out of that pan that we can get so we're not wasting anything there just like that and then we're going to spread it out in the mold get it all pretty even thickness in there [Music] now once we get to this point we just need to let it solidify then we can take the mold off and come back and cut it into bars all right so once you've let this thing sit and dry out solid now we can go ahead and just take this mold off again this is just a normal soap mold pretty easy to get it apart and get it off a little bit of residue right there we'll save that and eat it it's not a big deal a little bit on that side give it a taste now man got a good flavor to it yeah man that's really good i'm gonna peel this mold off of it just like that now we'll take what we have left here and we'll just cut it into bars just like that about the same size okay to store these bars i just use regular butcher paper [Applause] myself a piece out here big enough for a few bars [Applause] take that off of there stack these off to the side for a minute just like this turn this off this is probably enough for at least two right here i cut that longer i needed to we'll just wrap that dude up just like that wrap them over a couple times [Applause] [Applause] anyone just give us a piece of jute twine here cut it off wrap him around a couple of times tie him up there we go now we're ready to store that dude in our haversack we got a good trail snack [Applause] [Applause] all right guys well we've got a bag of jerky here one little ball of pemmican in there and then we've got a bag of pemmican bars we've got six of those in here wrapped up butcher paper if i was going to take these on the trail i would take them out of this plastic bag there's no sense having something that will add moisture to it wrapping them in the butcher paper is good enough this is just an easy way for me to carry them for the time being they don't need to be stored in refrigerator they can be shelf stored so as long as you store them somewhere where bugs and rodents aren't going to get into them they'll be fine again it will last pretty much and definitely even at room temperature that's the great thing about pemmican as well as beef jerky moisture and rodents and things like that are your biggest enemies with this stuff other than that you got no worries now just a quick recap we took the ingredients that we used were venison ground apples ground walnuts we mixed those together with the tallow which is beef tallow in this case and we had venison for the meat we mixed all of it together to consistency where we crushed it together and it would stay together even when it was still damper in a liquid state of the tallow we spread that out in the mold let it dry to set up hard chopped it into bars now we're ready to rock and roll don't be afraid to mix and match don't be afraid to put other ingredients in there to see what you think the taste is like and what tastes best to you because anything will work in there you can use any type of dried fruit that you want to use any type of dried meats that you want to use should be fine and then make sure that you get tallow and not lard like i said you can buy beef tallow on amazon appreciate you guys joining for this video i thank you for everything you do for school for family and for business for all our sponsor instructors affiliates and friends i'll be back with another video as soon as i can guys thanks

Channel: David Canterbury

Views: 107,163

Keywords: Bushcraft, Survival, David Canterbury, Dave Canterbury, Pathfinder, The Pathfinder School, Archery, Hunting, Fishing, Camping, Primitive Skills, Fire, Water, Shelter, Navigation, First Aid, Search and Rescue, Signaling, Prepper, Preparedness, Self Reliance, Survivability, The 10 C's, Knives, Axes, Saws, Bow Drill, Ferrocerium Rod, Ferro Rod, Tarp, Hammock, Canteen, Cooking, Longhunter, Trapping

Id: NACHwzLjy6o

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021