Sounds promising! Ok, last dumb question: Does it taste good?

It has a somewhat strange mouth feel to me, I guess because it has so much fat, but the stuff I get from US Wellness meats tastes great. This is my third day of eating pemmican only to try and kick start weight loss. I plan to go back to my "normal" eating tomorrow, but will still be eating the pemmican for some meals.

Let me know how it works for weight loss!

I just bought The River Cottage Meat Book and it has a whole section on curing meat and making your own sausages.

My pemmican experiment is over and I'm down four pounds from Friday to Monday. I'm sure a lot of that is water, but it was nice to see. I used a ketostix this morning and don't think I've ever seen that dark of a shade of pink. Being in deep ketosis might be the reason I didn't even want to look at another spoon of pemmican after lunch today. I ate a bit for breakfast and some for lunch but gave the rest I'd portioned out to the dog. Ugh. It's good but enough is enough; I'm ready for something else for supper (although I'm not at all hungry).

Good job! Now is that all you ate for 5 days?

No, only three and a half days and I also had some cream in coffee those days.

BTW, hubby said he heated his pemmican and stirred in some seasonings and said it was way better than eating it cold or at room temp. Guess I'll have to try that next time.

Hello Everyone, I am fascinated by the previous postings about 'pemmican.' Sounds awesome! I found this thread while doing a "hiking" search. It seems you folks would be the ones to ask---

What LC foods can I take on a three week hike??

I am not an "ultra-lighter" but do want to keep my pack pretty light. I hiked the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to Maine) and ate mostly healthy foods but not low carb. Protein foods tend to be quite heavy and perishable.

ANy and all suggestions would be so helpful!!

Thanks!

Sunrise

Jerky, pemmican, even some trail mixes if you make them carefully.

I'm so glad to find this thread! This might solve my problems for what to take with me to eat during my class breaks!

Interesting.

Hello, I recognise some names here from my thread on the carnivous diet.

I HAVE made jerky and pemmican for 47 years. I eat nothing but meat.

I OFFER the correct way to prepare true pemmican, based on the principles developed by the Native American plains people. It has been done this way for countless generations.

WE WILL use beef. You can use any red meat, however beef is cheap, easily available, dries well and yields a tasty result.

I RECOMMEND bottom round, with very little marbling- marbling makes drying slower, but while it may taste better as a partially dried, short lived and leathery jerky, it is counterproductive for making fully-dried jerky for pemmican.

THE RULE for drying jerky is use only very FRESH NEVER FROZEN MEAT.

CUT into 1/8' slices/strips, ADD NOTHING.

DRAPE over rack, in oven with door ajar.

PLACE a light bulb in the bottom and connect through a thermostat.

DRY only at precisely 40C (104F) no more, no less. Dry untill dark in colour and very brittle/friable.

DO NOT use marrow fat, it spoils very quickly and will go rancid. If you use 'cod fat', that is, suet from the outside of the carcass it will yield a softer and perhaps nicer flavoured pemmican, but the hard 'kidney suet' from around the kidneys will give a firmer and much better keeping pemmican.

RENDER the suet into tallow in 3/4 in slices on a rack in a pan in the oven at NO MORE than 250F. A higher temperature gives the tallow a burnt smell and taste and discolours the fat, lower take forever and may not properly dry out the tallow.

PROPER, long keeping pemmican is dried lean and fat, 50/50 by WEIGHT. No berries or additives of any kind should be used, as they will cause rapid spoilage and are inappropriate if you are on a zero carb or very low carb diet.

WEIGH a portion of the crispy-crunchy totally dried jerky.

POWDER the jerky thoroughly. It will crumble to a powder very easily if it has been properly and thoroughly dried. It is best to process the jerky while still warm from drying to make sure it is very dry.

COOL the rendered liquid tallow to warm but not uncomfortably warm to your skin.

WEIGH AND POUR an equal weight of the warm liquid tallow onto the dry powdered jerky, mix and compress into a firm greasy mass- excluding all air.

PACK the fresh, soft pemmican into a dry container- fill until all air is excluded and seal tightly against moisture. You can keep it at room temperature for up to 30 years if it has been made with kidney suet/tallow. Perhaps less if from cod suet. I doubt anyone will be able to store it long enough to be a problem anyway, if you like it, unless you have the ambition to make a lot of it.

TO EAT: Warm some water, cut off a lump of pemmican and mash it in the water until you have a warm gruel. It is very greasy and hard to eat dry, but is very tasty as a gruel. To keep all the nutrients, it must never have been subjected to a temperature above 40C/104F. It will feed you as a single food, with no deficiencies in nutrition for a year or more, it even prevents scurvy.

JERKY requires adding fat, so unless you can add fat from anopther source, it is not good to eat it straight for very long without fat. Alone, lean jerky soon causes dysentery and debilitation from protein poisoning ('rabbit starvation').

Funny to read this today. I'm in Germany and my neighbours are a wonderful couple in their late 60s, last week they went back to ttheir elementary school and did a little lecture. One of the children who had grown up and gone to school in the US for part of her life adamantly disagreed with something they said and insisted the the colonizing of North America did not involve much interaction between the white and the reds, some deals, some treaties etc. and a few skirmishes. This is what she was taught in her US school. They didn't want to argue with her, but had a quiet word with the teacher afterward, suggesting that maybe some accurate history was in order.

The introduction of disease is what killed a vast majority of the natives here. A white man would travel away from his white settlement to establish trade with the natives, innoculating them with diseases that they had never been exposed to. They would then take it back to their tribes and neighboring tribes to the west.

As the white settlers developed growing pains, they expanded west only to find that the majority of the population had been cleared for them. Think of a devastation akin to the plague. The vast majority of people had no interaction with the natives. White settlers inturpreted this as their go ahead for "manifest destiny". The few tribes that remained/survived were treated cruley/starved out/moved/killed/tortured/ect because of the greed for gold and other natural resources.

So in a way, I can see why the student felt the way they did. Millions of native americans were not killed directly from the hands of white settlers, rather from the illnesses from the white man. (not that makes it any less horrible)

This is what I was taught this in school along side of the atrocities which white man inflicted upon the remaining native american peoples. The exploitation of the native americans will always be a real tradgedy.

AB on Good eats has a good show on making jerky..

BEAR

how much would you sell 10 lb for???
busy,busy life working and homeschooling and all that...............