- How explorers made pemmican.

Pemmican is the legendary food of explorers.  Its use dates back thousands of years and it played a critical role in some of our greatest tales of exploration.

It's also recognized as one of the most energy dense foods ever created.

Pemmican is nothing more than raw dried meat and fat - made into into a super-charged nutrition bar.

When made properly it can be stored for months if not years at room temperature without spoiling.

The really important quality of pemmican is that men and women enduring hard physical labor, day in and day out, could live healthily on pemmican alone.  There are historical records of people surviving for years on nothing but pemmican.

A continual diet of 100% meat and fat would normally lead to a vitamin C deficiency and scurvy as well as numerous other problems.  But pemmican made in the traditional way carries a lot more nutrition than the meat and fat we usually eat for dinner.  So conditions like scurvy never became a problem.

To make pemmican you need tallow and lean raw meat:

Tallow:  You can review this post about making tallow.  The only caveats are that when making pemmican you need tallow from a grass fed animal.  That's where some of the extra nutrients come from.  Tallow from grain fed animals won't have everything you need to maintain a balanced diet.  To preserve those nutrients you need to render the fat slowly at a low temperature so that you don't denature the Omega 3 fatty acids and amino acids.  Keep it below 240 degrees F.  For good temperature control you can render the fat in a roasting pan in the oven, which should take about half a day but won't need much monitoring.

Lean Raw Meat:  Beef, bison, deer and elk were commonly used.  Pork and lamb are not recommended.  Once again, grass fed is better than grain fed.  You need to slice the meat thinly which is easier to do if you first freeze it till it's firming up and then slice it.  Cut it across the grain, as it will dry more quickly that way. The meat can be dried in the oven. You don't want to cook it, just dry it.  That's the main difference between pemmican meat and jerky or biltong. They are both cooked during the drying process. If you dry the meat at the lowest oven temperature possible, you'll be on the right track.  You'll know it's ready when you bend it over and it snaps in two.  It's a tempting idea to marinate the meat first, but don't do that.  The sugars and oils in the marinade will shorten the shelf life of the pemmican considerably.  Once dried the meat then needs to be ground into powder.  Food processors with steel blades are a good way to do that.

You then melt your tallow and mix it with the powdered meat in a 1:1 ratio.  While the tallow is still soft the pemmican mix can be poured into a tray to set.  Once hard it can be cut into meal portions the size of a large candy bar.  It needs to be sealed in something air-tight.  You can be traditional and use wax paper for that.  A ziploc bag with the air pressed out of it would be fine too.

Flavor has never been one of pemmican's strong points.  It was a functional food and not a pleasure food.  Its flavor can be enhanced by the addition of up to 20% dried berries or salt and pepper.

Many of the Native American groups in the North East US and Southern Canada made and used pemmican.  They called it pimikan and it probably derives from a Cree-Chippewa word for fat.  They introduced it to European trappers and it became an important trade item.

Pemmican was a staple for explorers.  They would source other foods opportunistically, but they always had pemmican as a fall-back.

It really came into its own and took on international prominence during the race for the South Pole between Amundsen and Scott. 

There are many reasons why Amundsen won that race and Scott lost everything including his life. But Amundsen's highly scientific approach to making the pemmican he and his team used certainly played an important part in getting him over the finish line first. And back home alive to tell the story.

For more detailed instructions for making pemmican you can download the Pemmican Manual.

Other how-to and DIY from the pioneers and settlers can be downloaded for free at Pioneer Handbooks.com.

Even if you never expect to make pemmican, you can still hit the Facebook Like button below and save this how-to from disappearing into history

It's easy enough to do and a good way to keep this knowledge alive.

A big thank you to Keith H. Burgess at A Woodsrunners Diary for the explorer image and Cephalapod Productions for the pemmican image.