Freezer Cleanout Venison Pemmican
working in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley provide her with many opportunities to expand her
culinary horizons and continue to learn and grow through hunting, fishing, foraging, and farming.
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If you’re needing to make room in your freezer and/or use up large chunks of meat, look no further than this easy three-ingredient pemmican.
Pemmican is believed to have originated among indigenous people of North America, and used as a survival food for travel and trade. A combination of dried ground meat, fat, and often berries, it lasts a long time and is nutritionally concentrated.
This version is made simple and relatively quick with common kitchen gadgets, and it’s a great way to practice butchering and meat processing skills. It’s essentially a powdered jerky combined with an equal amount of rendered fat, which comes together almost like an animal-based dough and has a dense, semi-crumbly consistency. The idea is to keep your water content as low as possible to stave off any chance of spoilage.
This stuff has been a gamechanger, as I follow a strict clinical ketogenic diet. Most of the calories come from the fat, but there’s plenty of protein, tons of vitamins, and just the right amount of flavor from the spices to make this a wild food super-fuel.
For some reason, many people seem to have this idea that pemmican tastes unpleasant. I have not found that this is the case. I will say that using really good fat, like grassfed beef suet that’s golden-yellow with all the antioxidants the animal had been eating at the height of the growing season, makes a huge difference.
My first batch was made with the whole shoulder and the heart of a whitetail buck — well, what was left of it anyway. The second batch was made from three deer shoulders and a neck roast. I don’t add any additional ingredients beside meat and fat. To me it tastes clean and meaty, sweet and peppery. A little goes a long way. May it keep you going through all your adventures, from hunting trips to busy workweeks. It’s awesome to be so nourished by past harvests with this ancient preparation.
Serving Size: 12+ servings, depending on bar size
Time to make: 6 hrs, give or take
Special Equipment: Meat grinder, dehydrator, jerky gun (optional), blender or food processor, slow cooker (if rendering own fat), kitchen scale, mesh strainer
Also works with: Lean bison or beef
Looking for more pemmican recipes? Try out Justin Townsend’s Wild Venison, Kale, and Blueberry Pemmican Bars!
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Freezer Cleanout Venison Pemmican
12
servings6
hoursKeep the screen of your device on
Ingredients
2 lbs lean deboned venison (can use shoulders, shanks, hindquarters, neck, trimmed scraps etc)
2 lbs rendered beef fat (tallow), see instructions below if you need to render your own
Spice blend of choice, to taste (try out Harvesting Nature’s Big Game Blend!)
Preparation
- For the Venison
- Begin by cutting the meat into chunks small enough to fit into your meat grinder; no need to remove silverskin, just trim off fat/bloodshot/anything that might get caught up in the grinder. Use a coarse die and grind the meat.
- Use your hands to work the spice blend, if using, into the meat until evenly seasoned. You may let it sit (covered) in the fridge up to overnight to absorb the flavors or use right away.
- Next you need to get the ground meat into thin pieces for drying. You can use a jerky gun’s flat nozzle attachment, or wax paper and two heavy cutting boards to press the meat into an even layer; this is most space-efficient. We poke holes in the “meat sheet” for airflow.
- Fill your dehydrator trays with the flattened-out ground meat and dry until snaps without bending. You want it to be drier than jerky and the time it takes depends on your dehydrator; mine are not fancy. It will be several hours.
- Once the meat is dried, break it into smaller pieces into a DRY blender pitcher or food processor and grind it into a fine powder.
- Weigh the dried mixture and jot it down, and set aside in a cool, dry place.
- For the Fat
- If using pre-rendered, fully cooked tallow, you need only heat it up to a liquid that’s not too hot to handle, weighing out an equal amount as your powdered ground meat.
- If rendering your own fat, trim any blood or discolored areas from almost-thawed suet and chop up into small pieces to help it render better.
- Use your slow cooker’s low/12-hour setting to gently cook the fat. The smell is pervasive and you may want to do this outside or in a well-ventilated area. When it’s done, skim off any impurities from the top and pour the hot fat through a mesh strainer to catch remaining solids. Some of these can be saved and enjoyed as beef “cracklins.”
- Weigh out the same amount of fat as your powdered ground meat and let cool enough to handle but not cool enough to solidify.
- PUTTING IT TOGETHER
- Once you have equal amounts of powdered dried meat and liquid fat by weight, put the dried meat in a 9×13 casserole dish and begin pouring in the fat.
- Use your hands to mix meat and fat, evenly incorpating the tallow into the venison. You want the meat to be totally soaked in fat, but there shouldn’t be much fat pooling on top of the meat.
- Press the meat/fat mixture flat into the dish in an even layer. A rubber spatula is helpful for this and scraping any excess off the sides into the layer.
- Let the meat/fat mixture cool and set, and cover with plastic wrap or paper. Cut into bars as desired and enjoy. It can be vacuum sealed and frozen, too.
- Notes
- Some things to watch out for: if rendering your own fat, opt for beef suet (interior beef fat from around the kidney area), as trim fat is softer and will affect the firmess and sliceable-into-bars texture of the final product. If you can get rendered beef fat, grassfed is ideal; bison would be great too.
- Also, if you use a instant pot, be cognizant of water that might form on the inside of the lid and drip into the liquid fat; definitely get as much of the water out as possible by letting the fat cool and solidify (separating from the water) and reheating the fat.
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