Homemade Pemmican / Wasna
Homemade pemmican using dried, smoked venison, bison or beef, dried fruit, melted tallow and natural sweeteners.
Servings: 16
Calories: 73kcal
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.
Video
Notes
This is a 2% salt ratio, feel free to cut it in half if you're sensitive to salt. To calculate the percentage of salt you must use grams. For a 1% concentration, multiply the weight in the meat in grams by .01. For example, if you use 1000 grams of meat, you'd use 10 grams of salt.
Nutrition
Serving: 1teaspoon | Calories: 73kcal | Carbohydrates: 4g | Protein: 0.1g | Fat: 6g | Saturated Fat: 2g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 3g | Cholesterol: 6mg | Sodium: 316mg | Potassium: 26mg | Fiber: 1g | Sugar: 2g | Vitamin A: 17IU | Vitamin C: 4mg | Calcium: 4mg | Iron: 0.1mg