Tallow and Pemmican

 I'd ordered a bag of beef fat from a butcher for a forthcoming camp with the view to making tallow. I intend to make an oil lamp on a primitive pottery course I've booked for next year, soap and more immediately some pemmican. The first stage was to generate some venison jerky in my dehydrator

I've never been much of a fan of pemmican but maybe that's because the meat is usually dried unadulterated so I marinaded the meat overnight using soy sauce and a shop purchased jerky rub. At the same time I dried some chopped Blueberries to add too. Once dried I blitzed both.

 

To finish the dried ingredients off I roughly blitzed some pine kernels. The kernels are then added to the mix which is about 50 g of jerky, about a dozen Blueberries chopped into small pieces and Pine Kernels as per the picture above.

Back in the day when researching pemmican there was so much variation in the ingredients, methods and thoughts on how to make that I just tried to tread a central path though them I guess beef would mimic Bison and Venison, well Venison. The Blueberries are in to replace Saskatoons (June berries) which occur a lot in recipes and seem very similar , and Pine Kernels may have been available in certain areas to the Native Americans depending where they were. The dry mix was processed through my vacuum sealer for my forthcoming camp. 

I picked up the beef fat to process whilst out. It was noticeable just how much textural variation there was depending where the cut came from and indeed some recipes suggest that internal, rather than muscular fat was to be used (i.e. the fat around major organs). 

Whilst the powdered jerky mix was having a bit of a  brief dalliance with some Oak smoke in my Pro Q Cold Smoker which I'd brought with me mainly to do some cheese I cut the pieces into half inch chunks to speed them on their way in a timely fashion. I try and remove any larger pieces of meat but a hundred per cent clearance isn't necessary.

To get tallow you need to add the chunked fat into a billy and on to some embers top get a steady boil going. This batch took around two hours but you'll know when the time is right because the fat pieces reduce in size and brown up...Time to remove them

To capture the now golden liquid you use a muslin or a sieve to get out the smaller bits and any bits of the wood that have made their way in. I find a muslin gets pretty much everything that's not wanted.

Whilst it is still in liquid form carefully add some tallow to the powdered pemmican mix so that the mixture is saturated but not overrun. The smaller greaseproof container shown above was made using this pattern.

As it cools down you'll have yourself a 'brick' of pemmican, wipe off any excess tallow before it sets. It's still something I can take or leave, especially as it is a bit of effort, but this isn't too bad. I wonder if the marinade on the jerky has made a difference or maybe my previous experiences and tastings were Beef? Just one final meat suggestion for the future is dried salmon which I've seen listed and again, would have been plentiful across the pond in certain areas.

And  your remaining tallow will form into an off-white easily stored block when it finally cools down. all ready for me to store away for the other projects mentioned.