The Pemmican Report -- & Many Questions

[Guest guest]

I just sampled my very first batch of home-made pemmican, and I had to spit

it out and wipe off my tongue with a towel -- and then I had to cut off my

tongue, flush it down the toilet and burn the toilet. My GOD it was

disgusting! I don't even know how to describe how it tastes; it's uniquely

awful. If anyone here is a pemmican expert and would like to help me out,

though, I'll happily send you a chunk to taste, because I sure need all the

advice I can get!

For in case it sheds any light on the matter, here's what I did.

I marinated thin slices of (grass-fed) london broil in raw-milk kefir with

a bit of crushed garlic and marjoram for about 30 hours. (I'd meant to do

it for 12 hours, but life got in the way, as usual.) Then I put the strips

of meat, minus almost all the kefir, in the dehydrator at 145 degrees for

about 48 hours. I tried eating a piece afterwards, and while it wasn't

appetizing, it also wasn't gruesome beyond belief.

I have a medium-sized Cuisinart, so I ran the dried meat through in batches

to turn it to powder, and that's where I ran into my first obvious

problem. The Cuisinart just wasn't very effective at powdering the

meat. I kept having to take it out, dump it in a strainer and stir it

around with a spoon to get most of the powder out and then put the

remaining chunks of dried meat back in the processor for another extended

and mostly-ineffective round of processing. Between the three batches of

meat and putting each batch in over and over again, I must have done this

fifteen times, and in the end I had to discard a little of the meat because

there just wasn't enough volume for the Cuisinart to work. Is there a

better way to grind the meat? Would an actual meat grinder work, or would

that be a problem with dried meat?

I had previously rendered some buffalo suet, so I melted some in a saucepan

and poured most of it into the meat powder and mixed them together, then I

browned some sesame seeds in the rest of the fat and poured the mixture

into the mud and mixed again. Then I poured the mud into a parchment-lined

baking dish and stuck it in the fridge to solidify.

Could I have ruined the suet? A couple months ago I asked about that here,

as I was concerned that the chunks of fat were browning too much. Should I

not have marinated the meat in kefir, or not so long? Should I have

skipped the sesame seeds, or used a small amount of dehydrated cherries or

cranberries instead?

The best description I can come up with of the taste is that there's an

unpleasant burnt milk powder element (and here's where I'm thinking no

kefir next time) along with a nasty burnt pan scrapings undertone. Did I

use too high a temperature dehydrating the beef? Should I have used less

suet, and poured it into the meat powder when it had cooled some? It did

make crackling sounds as it poured in. Should I have skipped browning the

sesame seeds? I had real misgivings about that, and they definitely don't

taste good in there.

I'd really appreciate any help, as I was counting on pemmican as a

portable, healthy snack that would be very filling and get me through any

emergencies.

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