Coconut pemmican and any other pemmican ideas?

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

After bringing homemade pemmican to the Winds, I started thinking of other kinds of pemmican I could make. I thought coconut pemmican might be good.

I mixed melted tallow with a little coconut manna and added shredded coconut. Pressed this mixture into muffin cups and let harden. On some of them I pressed chopped macadamia nuts into the top for variety. I considered melting chocolate on top, too, but then I remembered that I really liked how my meat pemmican made a great dinner stew base, so I decided to keep it neither sweet nor savory. There was something about the warmed beef tallow mixed with vegetables and rehydrated sweet potatoes that was just so comforting and satisfying. I am hoping my coconut pemmican will make a great dinner curry base in addition to being a high-energy food all by itself.

I tasted the leftover in the pan and it's pretty darn good by itself.

As for regular meat pemmican, I didn't think my meat pemmican tasted all that great, but I intend to try meat pemmican again, too. Perhaps I will add dried fruit or tomatoes to the meat pemmican or maybe even make pemmican with tallow and dried pork or chicken instead. It really doesn't need to be the survivalist pure pemmican since on a backpack trip I've got lots of other variety to eat.

Has anyone made any other unusual pemmican concoctions?

[James Marco]

Well, I am not sure if it is exactly pemmican. I substitute nuts for meat and chocolate for tallow turning it into energy bars at ~155C/oz.

[Harald Hope]

Pemmican is only going to be as good as its two ingredients, if you aren't using grass fed beef and beef fat, the flavor and quality difference is going to be pretty noticeable. Hint: check for mexican groceries and butchers, they know and like real meat, though of course, they also sell poor quality meats, so you have to find a butcher/store that stocks good meat. If you dry the meat at over 125, you are no longer really making pemmican, since the meat is cooked,, totally different flavor then. And if you render the fat at over 240, it gets a bad, sort of burned taste.

I found on a recent trip that the pemmican started tasting better every day, I think that's because my body started to recognize what an amazing food/energy source it is.

When the Indians started to sell pemmican to the white trappers and other frontier type people who learned how amazing it was as traveling food, they discovered that euros have a sweet tooth, and couldn't really get the actual flavor. Indians loved the flavor from what I read, and often preferred pemmican to meat. Makes sense, has more fat thus more goodness.

To adapt their trade pemmican to euro sweet teeth, they added a bit of ground up dried berries to the mix. One problem with that should be obvious, you are introducing sugars into an organic compound that is going to get warm during the day every day. Bacteria love sugar.

to me the best solution is to solve the sweet tooth, not to sweeten the pemmican.

I didn't try using pemmican as a stock for meals because it's virtually impossible to clean off rendered beef fat from a pot with cold water, it's difficult enough as it is with hot sink water and soap. So I just eat it and lick my fingers, that seems to work well. I use olive oil in meals, 2 oz a day is 500 calories, 4 oz, 1000. That also is the absolutely best way to drop pack weight, forget cuben and all that stuff, just use real food and a lot of fat.

By the way, as I posted in another thread here, if you haven't tried real old world cured meats, like jamon serrano, lomo (from spain), or its slightly less tasty cousin prosciutto, as a topping for breads or other things, you really should give it a try. Runs around 25 a pound, give or take, here in the usa. Tip: avoid anything that comes presliced in plastic packages, that stuff tastes really bad. Has to be sliced off the whole piece in front of you or it's not so good.

I'd thought of doing that instead of the old salami standby, and it elevated my meal stops to small little peak events every single day.

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

I used grass-fed tallow for my pemmican, but purchased lean grocery store meat. It just lacked much in the way of flavor so was a little hard to eat. It left me feeling good after eating it.

I just thought I could create different recipes of pemmican. I don't really need it to be survival food since I'm just backpacking for a few days and have other things in my pack. I really liked the taste of the tallow in my sweet potatoes and can see having tallow on hand in convenient portions is going to improve my food a lot. I was thinking about drying pork tenderloin and making pork pemmican with my grass-fed beef tallow. Maybe that's an abomination but I'm betting if I put that in my dinner stew it would be delicious.

I also had made a concoction with almond butter, tallow and coconut that was really tasty and wonder about the possibility of using tallow as a base or ingredient for sweet things.

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