Dried meat mixed with fruit and tallow is a food tradition so ancient it likely predates anything else I've shared on this site. Pemmican and it's cousin wasna may seem like a labor intensive trail snack, and they are. They're also useful teaching recipes, and portable, nutrient-dense foods. Smoky, earthy, salty, and slightly sweet, it's an amalgam of flavors you can adapt and make your own.
What is Pemmican?
While most people associate pemmican with tins of powdered beef jerky, and it's similar in some ways, but the two are different. The word pemmican comes from a Cree word ᐱᒦᐦᑳᓐ or pimîhkân.
Essentially it's sun-dried meat that's pounded, mixed with dried fruit and bound with melted tallow. There's numerous traditional variations and permutations, most notably in my mind the Lakota / Souix wasná which is similar, but more flexible in the ingredients it may contain.
Where pemmican is simply dried meat, tallow, and possibly fruit, wasná can include other ingredients like dried parched corn or nuts and seeds. I've even seen my friends Luke and Linda Black Elk (who heads Chef Sean Shermans' non-profit NATIFS) make vegetarian versions of wasná using dried ground corn, fruit, nuts, and oil.
Traditional Fruit Used to Make Pemmican
People undoubtedly used any fruit they could get their hands on, but cranberries, chokecherries, and serviceberries are the most heavily documented that I know of, particularly serviceberries.
With wild cherries like chokecherries, it's important to know that they're dried and crushed in their entirety, including the shell and pit. Of the cherries below, sand cherries are my favorite (bottom) with black cherries and chokecherries being my second choice. Pin cherries contain a much higher proportion of seed, making them better for wild cherry jelly and syrup.
The shells will never completely break down and will retain a crunchy texture. Instead of a spice grinder, I like to use a Vitamix dry bowl to grind cherries, which I sift afterwards to remove large pieces of shell.
While the thought of cherry shells will sound off-putting to some, it's traditional, and Linda's told me that some people crave the robust crunch of the cherry shells. They can also be sifted to lessen, but not completely remove the crunch.
While most recipes online will instruct you to use dried cranberries or other fruit from a store, I avoid using these as any dried fruit from a store that's pliable and soft has been soaked in a sugar-syrup. Home dried fruit preserved without sugar should be cracker dry and easy to grind to a powder.
Small fruits like chokecherries and serviceberries can simply be dehydrated whole until cracker dry, but cranberries should be crushed or halved. If cranberries aren't cut or smashed, their skins tend to inflate and they will take much longer to properly dehydrate.
Most berries will be cracker dry after 24-48 hours, depending on size. While fresh fruit is best, you can also dry frozen berries, but they can make a mess of dehydrator trays, as you can see below.
Once the fruit's cracker dry, grind it to a fine powder in a spice grinder. For the finest powder you'll want to sift it after grinding, but it's optional.
How to Make Pemmican at Home
The first step is to trim some meat. Bison and venison are traditional, but beef or lamb or goat work too. Whatever meat you have, the first step in the process is to trim it and remove all silver skin. I've used excess venison scrap I had that was meant for sausage and needed lots of trimming.
If you use a cut like an eye of round or a sirloin the trimming and processing is much easier and you can simply cut the meat into long, ½ inch thick slices that will dry quickly.
After the meat's trimmed it's mixed with salt. I recommend anywhere from 1-2% of the meat's weight in salt, measured in grams. Mix the meat with the salt and allow it to rest overnight in the fridge.
The next day it's time to dry the meat. Many recipes simply instruct you to put the meat in the dehydrator, but I like to mimic slow-drying over a wood fire by cooking the meat at a very low temperature in a pellet smoker.
After the meat's cooked in the smoker I remove it and dehydrate until bone-dry in a dehydrator or my air-fryer. This can take 24-48 hours depending on how thick your meat is, so consider cutting any thick slices into smaller pieces if they're taking a long time to dry.
Next, break the meat into pieces and put it in a food processor. Pulse the meat to break it up, then transfer to a spice grinder and continue grinding as fine as you can. Do the same with the dried fruit.
Finally, mix the dried, ground meat in a bowl with the ground fruit, add the tallow, some maple syrup, birch syrup or maple sugar, and mix to combine.
Measurements are as approximate here, and you'll need to go by feel a bit. If the mixture seems crumbly or has trouble staying together, add a little more tallow and mix again until it can be formed into small balls and the mixture holds its shape.
Finally, adjust the seasoning until it tastes good to you. The finished pemmican will keep for a long time in the fridge. While traditionally it was stored at room temperature, tallow will eventually go rancid if not refrigerated so I prefer to keep mine vacuum sealed, chilled or frozen.
Adapting the Recipe
There's tons of ways you can make this your own, or in my case, try to put some make up on them so people don't give you weird looks when you hand them a dried jerky ball at a dinner.
Besides dusting them with sour cranberry powder as shown at the beggining of this post, I like pressing nuts into a small brownie-bite mold to form little square bars.
You can adjust the flavors of fruit and meat however you like. Want a really sour version? Add ground wild plum powder. Want them sweeter and less meat-forward? increase the amount of fruit powder, or use acorn flour for a more neutral taste.
I really like serving a powerful, single bite serving that takes the palette on a ride. Sour, salty, smoky, sweet, and even spicy garnished with a pinch of ghost pepper salt. I'm sure you can come up with plenty of interesting variations.
Have you made homemade pemmican or wasna? If you have let me know in the comments.
Related Posts
Homemade Pemmican / Wasna
Equipment
- 1 Dehydrator
- 1 Pellet smoker
- 1 Spice grinder
- 1 Medium mixing bowl
Ingredients
- 1.5 lbs lean bison, venison or beef all fat and silverskin removed
- 1 lb fresh berries such as cranberries, serviceberries, or chokecherries
- 13 grams (roughly two teaspoons) kosher salt see note
- 3 grams (½ teaspoon) fresh ground black pepper optional
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup or birch syrup, plus more to taste
- ½ cup rendered beef or bison tallow melted
- small bite-sized anise hyssop leaves for serving, optional
Instructions
Dried Meat (Bapa)
- Cut the meat into long slices about 1/ 2 inch thick. Toss the meat with the salt and pepper if using and refrigerate overnight in a covered container.
- Lay the meat out in a pellet smoker and smoke at the lowest temperature (mine goes down to 165F) for 4 hours, or until completely cooked through.
- Next, transfer the meat to a dehydrator and dry at the highest temperature (150F) until completely cracker dry and brittle, about 24 hours depending on the thickness of your meat.
- Alternately, you can skip the smoking step and simply dehydrate the meat, but the smoke adds a great flavor and I recommend doing it if you can.
Dried Fruit
- Meanwhile, prepare and dry the fruit. I recommend using a blend of half dried cranberries and half other fruit like serviceberries.
- Fruit like chokecherries or serviceberries can be dried whole, while cranberries should be halved first. Keep the fruit separate to give you better control over the flavor.
- Put the fruit in a dehydrator at 150F and dry until completely bone dry and brittle when crushed, about 24-48 hours.
Assembly
- Break the meat into pieces and pulse in a food processor to break it up. Continue processing until it's as fine as you can get it, then transfer to a spice grinder and process to a fine powder.
- Grind the fruit to a fine powder in a spice grinder. You will have more than you need. Make sure to save some cranberry powder (at least ¼ cup) for tossing the pemmican balls in for serving, if you want.
- For finishing, I like to sift the cranberry powder to make sure it's as fine as possible, but it's optional.
- For each cup (112g) of dried meat powder, you'll want about ½ cup (56 g) dried fruit powder.
- Combine the ground meat and berry powder in a bowl with the tallow and maple syrup. Mix to combine until you can form balls of the mixture that hold their shape. I like to portion it into small teaspoon-sized balls, like a chocolate truffle.
- Taste the mixture and adjust the seasoning until it tastes good to you. Adding additional serviceberries will add sweetness, where cranberry powder will add tartness.
- Finally, toss the balls in some extra cranberry powder to coat, then serve on an anise hyssop leaf as pictured, or just by themselves.
Beth
I'm interested in the vegetarian version, can you share Alan?
Alan Bergo
Hi Beth, unfortunately I don't have exact proportions. When I've seen and tasted it before, finely ground cornmeal or other grains (wild rice, etc) was used in place of the dried, powdered venison. To that they added different dried fruits and nuts, and unlike the meat version that's bound with tallow so it sticks together, the vegetarian wasna I've seen them make isn't bound with anything so it's kind of like very loose trail mix, with the bulk of it being cornmeal, interspersed with chunks of nuts and fruit, eaten by the palmful.
David Griggs
I wonder how dried/dehydrated tomatoes would work as a fruit source? Or dried ground cherries?
And do you think crushed cayenne pepper would lend anything to the flavor?
Further could you use wild goose breast as a meat source? It is more like red meat than poultry.
Alan Bergo
This would actually be a great place for Canadian goose meat. Cayenne is nice, when I served these at a dinner earlier this year I added a pinch of my ghost pepper salt on each of the balls after rolling in cranberry powder and it was good. You could vary the dried fruit lots of ways, tomatoes love smoke and would give a nice umami to it.
Cheri F Collins
I made Sean Sherman’s duck pemmican recipe twice, and love it! The second time, I packed a container full in my suitcase to bring to my son in San Francisco. TSA, with their usual brilliant discernment, had opened the container, probably wondered what the hell it was, and not sealed it shut! It wasn’t formed into balls yet, so the crumbs spilled out all over my stuff and embedded itself into my suitcase! In retrospect, I really should have complained to the airline. Moral of the story: form it into balls, wrap them, and label the container if you’re going to transport it by plane.
Alan Bergo
OMG a suitcase with dried meat and tallow crumbles 😭. Vacuum sealing it works really well, I still have a nice bag in my crisper.