Following reading The Fat Of The Land/Not By Bread Alone I have been planning on making pemmican

So finally I made a small (300 gram) batch and ate half of it today

And it was excellent.

The book says that of the three types of fat on a ruminant they ranked as:

First: tallow from marrow (the fatty stuff inside bones)

Second: tallow from suet (the fat from around the animal’s organs)

Last: tallow from muscle and skin fat

I am glad I waited until I had suet before I tried as the first tallow I made was from trimmings and it didn’t taste good. I’m leaving the fat on my steak since it tastes much better there than rendered to tallow

Recipe etc

So I made tallow out of 5kg of suet, that made about 3kg, I cut it into 100g-ish cubes and stored it. Tallow is shelf stable for years.

I cut a Scotch fillet (rib eye?) steak into thin slices and separated the fat (which I’ll cook with my next steak) and dehydrated it to very dry in a dehydrator set to 35°C

That came to 150g of dry meat

I blended the dry meat very fine in a food processor and put the result in a mixing bowl

I melted 150g tallow in a double boiler, then took it off the heat until it dropped to under 45°C then added it to the meat powder

I mixed by hand - next time I think I’ll use a wooden spoon - until it was well combined and the meat was saturated in tallow, they spread it out in a shallow rectangular dish like one would making brownies. I made this less than 1cm deep

I left it on the bench to set for a few hours, and cut it into four 80g (73 to 82g) pieces and just finished two of those pieces

This is going to be my food when working from the office (where it’s hard to get a meat lunch, and I start too early to eat a morning meal before work)

TODO:

Cardboard box dehydrator to let me dry larger batches. My dehydrator can only handle up to about twice what I did. I want to make kilos at a time

Other thoughts

I wonder if the people who make this and don’t like it used the worse fats

I wonder what pemmican made with marrow tallow tastes like

I think I’ll add salt to it next time

The Salisbury book is a difficult read

Edit: I just ate a third of the four slices I made and have hit my fat intake limit. I couldn’t eat more. I wonder how much I would have wanted if I had ridden two hours today as I do on days I cycle to work