I was inspired once again to chronicle my experience of making pemmican from start to finish. Why? Because I was trying out Slanker's Grass Fed Meat. The last time I tried this combo of eye of round and suet I was left licking my fingers because of how good it was. Lex, having shown me exactly how he makes his pemmican, made me want to see if I could emulate the recipe and taste. I have learned quite a few things since my first pemmican adventure.

In case you are not familiar with Pemmican, here is an excerpt from Ray Audette's Neanderthin.

Many aboriginal North Americans and European explorers ate an exclusive raw meat diet in the form of pemmican. This high energy food is produced by mixing extremely dried and powdered raw lean meat and hard animal fat in a one to one ratio. *Eighty-five percent of the calories in pemmican are derived from fat, making it the closest nutritional equivalent to human mother's milk. Pemmican will keep for decades without refrigeration and sustain a person without vitamin deficiency (scurvy, beriber, etc.) indefinitely. It provides those who eat it with very high energy from very little consumption (1/2 to 1 1/2 pounds per day if eaten exclusively). Because pemmican is almost entirely absorbed by the body (without the assistance from intestinal bacteria), very little waste results from digestion (one sixth normal solid waste). The benefits of pemmican and other native foods so impressed the polar explorer Vilhjamur Stefansson that he adopted the Inuit diet in his early twenties and kept to it nearly his entire life (he died at age eighty-three).

*Ray Audette's math seems to be off a little. A one to one ratio of lean and fat consists of 69% calories from fat and 31% from lean.

A strange occurrence happened when I started eating pemmican exclusively. I found that I was out of control hungry! While I've been on an all meat regime since July of 2008, I was curious to why, when I ate pemmican I would consume a lot more than usual. This passage from Neanderthin might be instructive:

As your body learns to digest and eliminate natural foods more quickly, you will experience a strong increase in appetite. This increased desire for food is often quite disconcerting to the new hunter-gatherer, although it is entirely natural and even desirable. This new hunger will make the new foods you are eating that much more satisfying. Preventing hunger is easy, just eat! Hunger will slow the metabolism as it forces the body to put more energy into eating all the time, you're well on your way to reaching goals.

Another reason not to count calories!

Now, onto the pemmican making process.

Here is the box from Slanker's. It was packed very well.

They include some literature about the quality of their meats. All of it can be found on their website. Carol, the woman who helped me, was extremely nice and shipping took less than a week.

I finished cutting the eye of round into about 1/4 inch strips. Notice the deep burgundy color I definitely don't get that with eye of round from Costco.

Here is a picture of the four jerky dryers I use. They usually dehydrate at around 95-100F with 75 watt light bulbs. Make your own jerky dryer by checking out this guide by Lex Rooker.

While the meat was drying, I started to render the suet. Following Lex's pemmican guide, I made sure not to render above 250F.

It took about 6 hours to render a couple pounds of the suet. In the second picture you can see how the bubbles have dissipated. I left it on an hour or two more until all the bubbles were gone.

I used a plastic jug, paper towel, and strainer to filter the fat. In the second picture you can compare Slanker's Suet (left) to US Wellness Meats tallow (right). Both have a yellow hue.

Lex's thoughts on Grass Fed vs Grain Fed fat:

There is quite a controversy (probably started by me) about the color of tallow rendered from different sources. I've rendered tallow many times and whether rendering suet, hide, or muscle fat it is my experience that it is always some shade of "clear" yellow like butter if it is from grass fed animals. Depending on the time of year the color may be very very pale pastel yellow (almost white with a yellow cast) or it could be a deep rich yellow, but it has always been yellow. This is for rendered fat. When it is liquid it is a golden amber color and then it hardens to some shade of yellow when it cools.

Fat that is from animals that were grain finished or where they've fed brewers solids as a supplement to grass, have always been more of a putty color. Again varying from almost white to tanish brown or dark putty color.

If you take a look in my pemmican manual you'll see a bucket of tallow rendered from grass fed suet compared to a bucket of tallow rendered from suet and trimmings from my local butcher. The deep yellow color of the grass fed tallow is from meat harvested in the early summer so the animals had been eating the rich spring grass. It's not that dark yellow when from animals harvested in the early spring coming off winter where the grass is dry, of poor quality, and low in carotene.

Purchased commercial tallow and lard is often put through a chemical bleaching process to make it white. This is not always done but most people think white is "pure" so the extra step in processing makes it more appealing to the average consumer.

http://tinyurl.com/pmt983

After three days of drying, the jerky looked ready. I make sure to dry the jerky to the point where it will snap in half if bent. The point is to drive all the moisture out of the meat for long term storage.

Using my VitaMix, I pulsed the jerky to a mulch like consistency. Soon I'll be replacing my VitaMix with a motorized meat grinder that Lex and I plan on rebuilding. This should push my pemmican producing into overdrive!

I yielded about 52 ounces of jerky, and matched the lean with 52 ounces of suet. After I scooped out the suet, I tossed the bowl into the oven at 170F to melt.

When the fat is melted, I quickly tossed the ground jerky into the fat. Make sure the fat isn't too hot so you don't fry the dried jerky. Next step is bagging and you're done!

Finished! I yielded about 100oz of Pemmican. Each bag contains 10oz.