Pemmican Recipe General Steps: How to Make Pemmican

Pemmican is a dried food of ground wild game meat (like venison or elk) and leftover animal fat. A primitive protein bar of sorts, this survival food can last up to half a decade if you store it properly. Pemmican tastes similar to beef jerky, although pemmican is usually greasier than the crispy snack. Sometimes people include berries and other dried fruits in their pemmican mixtures for sweetness and extra carbs.

Pemmican rose to prominence among Indigenous North American tribes in what is now the United States and Canada. It became popular among European settlers and colonizers throughout their winters in North America, particularly for those engaged in the fur trade. Explorers began to use pemmican as a food staple for long-term excursions through the Arctic, too. The food is a common staple of backpacking and camping trips to this day.

Consider these four reasons to keep pemmican (ground wild game meat) on hand in case you need to survive in the wilderness:

• Pemmican is easy to store. After you dehydrate all the ingredients for pemmican, you can store them for very long periods. While refrigeration makes pemmican last as long as possible, it will keep for years at room temperature, too. So long as you have a plastic bag or even just a clean, cool place to store this food, you can eat it for as long as you might need to survive.
• Pemmican is filling. The Indigenous people of North America could survive on pemmican alone for an entire winter because the food is so filling in such small quantities. When you make pemmican, you shrink down meat proteins and fat to the slimmest possible size while still keeping nearly all the calories intact. This helps keep you full for a long time, day after day, night after night.
• Pemmican is long-lasting. Although pemmican requires a long prep time, it pays off in terms of the total time the food stays edible. You can measure its long shelf life in years, not just months. If you have plenty on hand, you’ll have a high-energy snack to nourish you for up to five years.
• Pemmican is nutritious. While the rendered fat in pemmican suggests you should steer clear of eating it every day unless necessary, pemmican still packs a lot of nutrients into its relatively small size. Especially when you include dried fruits like cranberries in your recipe, you’ll balance out the high fat and protein levels with carbohydrates, too.

Pemmican is easy to make and customizable to your own preferences. Follow these seven steps to make your own homemade pemmican:

1. 1. Choose your meat and berries. Mix and match different types of fruits and berries when you make your own pemmican. You could even use a distinct type of fat (like beef tallow) with meat from a different animal (like caribou meat). Include dried fruit like blueberries to boost your energy levels with more carbs. Peanut butter makes for a decent addition, too.
2. 2. Dehydrate the ingredients. Cut your lean meat into very thin strips and store the fat in a separate mixing bowl for later. Then use a food dehydrator or an oven on low heat to dry out any meat and fruit you plan to use. It will likely take several hours until you have the thoroughly dried berries and meat necessary to perform the next step in making pemmican.
3. 3. Grind the meat and berries. Once you’ve dehydrated all the ingredients besides the animal fat, take the dried meat and berries and run them through a food processor or meat grinder. Alternatively, you can also use a mortar and pestle to complete this process by hand. Grind them until they’re as fine a powder as possible.
4. 4. Strain out the fat. Take all the discarded lard and boil it until all the chunks start to crisp. Use a strainer so you can gather up the melted fat juices by themselves. At this point, you can also combine the fat with another ingredient, like coconut oil, if you so choose. You will need fat of some kind to make pemmican—so if you started your recipe with ground meat or already dried jerky, you’ll need to use a separate kind of lard or oil to complete your food.
5. 5. Mix the ingredients together. Combine equal parts of the dry ingredients and the liquid fat in a mixing bowl. Clump the ingredients into manageable portions and place them on a nearby baking sheet. Repeat the process with the rest of the ingredients.
6. 6. Cool the pemmican. Let your homemade pemmican mixture sit out for an hour or several more. During this time, it will start to coagulate and harden into the long-lasting food you can take with you on your next outdoor journey.
7. 7. Store the pemmican. Vacuum-sealing pemmican in an airtight container is useful but not entirely necessary. So long as you store your new pemmican bars in a cool, dark place (like your bug-out bag), they’ll stay edible for a long time. Keeping them in a plastic bag separated by pieces of parchment paper will help prevent them from all sticking together.

Certain outdoor activities carry an elevated risk of serious injury. Wilderness scenarios require extensive survival gear, including but not limited to food, water, maps, protective clothing, and first aid, along with mental and physical fortitude. This article is for educational and informational purposes, and is not a substitute for hard skills and expertise.

Prepare for any outdoor journey by grabbing a MasterClass Annual Membership and committing Jessie Krebs’s wilderness survival course to memory. As a former United States Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape instructor, Jessie can teach you everything you need to know about packing for a trip (neon is the new black), purifying water, foraging (crickets: the other white meat), starting a fire, and signaling for help (forget SOS).