Ground Jerky and Berry Pemmican
Dried meat, dried fruit, and tallow pressed into bars that keep without a cooler.
- calories
- 320
- weight
- 2 oz
- cal / oz
- 160
- protein
- 16 g
- serves
- 8, scales
- prep
- 45 min
- cook
- 0 min
- total time
- 45 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Snack
- Lunch
- No cook
- Backpacking
- Thru-hike
- Winter / snow
- Day hike
- Canoe / raft
- Gluten free
- Dairy free
- Nut free
- Eat in the bag
- Dehydrate ahead
- Shelf stable
- Actual cooking
Ingredients
| Lean bison, venison, or beef | 1 lb raw | trim every bit of fat or the bars go rancid |
|---|---|---|
| Kosher salt | 2 tsp | salt the meat before drying |
| Ground black pepper | 1 tsp | |
| Tart berries | 1 cup dried | serviceberries, cranberries, or chokecherries, dried hard, no added sugar |
| Maple syrup | 1 tbsp | |
| Rendered beef or bison tallow | 1/2 cup melted | clean and strained; anything with water in it will spoil |
| Anise hyssop leaves | 8 small leaves | optional, for serving |
Method
- At home: slice the trimmed meat thin, toss with the salt and pepper, and dry it in a dehydrator at 160F until it snaps rather than bends. Eight to twelve hours.
- Grind the dried meat to a powder in a blender dry container or spice grinder. It should look like coarse flour, not shreds.
- Dry the berries separately until they are cracker hard. Halve cranberries first or the skins balloon and never dry through. Grind them and sift out the shell fragments if you want less crunch.
- Mix the meat powder, berry powder, and maple syrup in a bowl.
- Melt the tallow and pour it in a little at a time, stirring, until the mixture holds together when squeezed. You want it bound, not soupy.
- Press into a lined pan about half an inch thick, chill until firm, and cut into eight bars.
- On the trail, eat them straight from the bag. In cold weather they get hard, so keep one in a chest pocket. Serve on an anise hyssop leaf if you brought them.
This is trail food that predates trail food. Powdered dry meat has almost no water left in it, and tallow is a fat with no water either, so the two together have nothing for bacteria to work with. That is the whole preservation trick, and it is why the fat has to be clean rendered tallow rather than butter or bacon grease.
Two things sink a batch. Fat left on the meat goes rancid months before the lean does, so trim hard. And store-bought dried fruit is usually soaked in syrup, which stays pliable and adds moisture back in; dry your own until it cracks. Ratio-wise, roughly equal volumes of meat powder and fat, with the fruit as a third of that, gives bars that hold shape in a pack without crumbling into dust.
Packing
Wrap each bar in parchment and put the stack in a single bag. Keep them out of direct sun in the pack lid; the tallow softens above about 80F and the bars slump together.
Variations
- Add a handful of dried parched corn ground fine for a wasna-style version with more carbohydrate.
- Swap half the tallow for coconut oil if you want a bar that stays firmer in heat.
- Cranberry powder dusted on the outside keeps the bars from sticking to each other.
https://foragerchef.com/homemade-pemmican-wasna