Pemmican & Charcuterie in backcountry?

[Poser]

Howdy all,

Planning my first Western backpack style hunt this Fall. I do quite a bit of of wild game Charcuterie such as dry cured sausages, fermented sausages, bresaola, salami, prosciutto etc and am interested in relying heavily upon these types of foods for a protein rich, yet lightweight diet in the backcountry. The obvious choice that comes to mind is to make Venison pemmican, which is dried venison and berries coated and preserved in rendered fat. A cupcake size serving yields about 500 calories. My initial thinking is that a meal could go something like this:

1 serving of pemmican (venison and rendered duck fat)
1 serving of couscous or similar (carb and something warm)
Double or triple mix of powered recovery drink (super concentrated)

That meal should produce several thousand calories and weigh next to nothing. The downside being, such small bites of calorie intensive meals often take 20 minutes or so before you begin to feel full. Mentally, you have to wrap your head around tiny portions and liquid versions of high yielding food.

Daily lunch and snacks would rely heavily upon dry cured game meats and sausages. Lack of moisture keeping the meat light, but fat has been added to at least some ofnthenitems. I was also thinking that Lardo (cured fatback) would be highly efficient. Basically, relying heavily upon cured protein (mostly wild game) and high quality performance and recovery drinks mixed in super contentrated concoctions for high calories and carbs as needed.

Anyone have experience with something similar or have empirical feedback? I am open to suggestions. I've read that some guys have had bowl problems going from a daily high protein diet to carb intensive, conventional backcountry meals, for example.

 

[Mckinnon]

I would determine how many calories per day you actually need and then start your meal planning. Much easier that way IMO. I also like dehydrating my own meals, spaghetti with venison sauce dehydrated well, just add boiling water in camp and wrap in a beanie, re-hydrates in 10-15 minutes. If you dehydrate your own stuff then you can eat closer to your normal diet and avoid the extra toilet paper problems your talking about.

 

[Becca]

I find your idea intriguing, and would be curious to hear about your experience if you choose to go this route. While we often take along precooked bacon, game meat salami/snack sticks/jerky etc. it does not supply the majority of our calories. This is mainly because in cold temps, I find hot food/drinks to be both emotionally and physically important. Besides making me feel warmer when I am chilled, having a hot entree at dinner time feels more like a meal to me.
Likely this is largely mental, but I think hiking and hunting hard is often a mental game and we do what we can to keep ourselves comfortable so that we stay out longer and hike farther. There was a discussion awhile back from a group of folks who were saving weight by leaving their stoves at home, and it seemed like the consensus was that while some didn't mind eating only cold grub, most would prefer to have the ability to warm things up. I suspect your concept would be similar....we could all survive off of a diet of pemmican (and many early arctic explorers did just that), but many would rather not...

 

[Poser]

Yeah, I don't see me giving up the stove simply because I refuse to give up a cup of coffee in the morning.
And, if I'm going to have the stove, might as well have at least some warm food (couscous, oatmeal etc), but wonder if I can't scale back the weight of food pretty hardcore and still get 5,000+ quality calories by doing something close to what is described above.

 

[Ray]

Have you eaten pemmican before? The tallow can be hard to manage for some folks due to texture and taste. Try some US Wellness Meat bars before making your own. It's very different than fat in sausage. I also found that in hot weather the fat liquified and just made a mess. A gross mess that I could not eat. I prefer to take small bites and swallow to skip the chewing and tallow slipperiness.

Months before your hunt you will need to condition your body to getting fuel from fat. It's called keto adapted. Research it along with Paleo, or even modern/revised Atkins for performance. You do not want to start this body change at the trailhead. You will run out of TP quickly and you will be exhausted as your body spends its energy looking for carbs.

I am a Paleo lifestyle guy. I use fats in all my meals. For backcountry hunting I use olive oil packs and coconut oil packs. I used to carry it in a bottle, but now use small packs from Amazon vendors. It allows for easy portion control and meal planning. I also use macadamia nuts - best fuel nut there is.

Fat has a lot of water content. It will never be lighter than freeze dried. It will provide more calories per oz though.

For snack foods I make nut/date bars. Paleo Magazine has the best recipe I have found. Everyday Paleo recipe is also very good. The coconut fat in them will be a sticky issue in hot weather.

I also eat young coconut flesh pieces. Great mix of carbs and fats plus fiber. Not light but lots of calories per oz.

I eat pumpkin pie bark for breakfast. Pie for breakfast while sheep hunting is hard to beat. Have not figured out the whipping cream yet.

 

[Poser]

Ray,

Yeah, I've made Pemmican before and enjoyed it quite a bit. I also eat a Paleo intensive diet and feel that my energy levels are highly increased when drawing energy from protein sources, specifically game meats, which seem to produce noticeably higher energy levels.

You are correct about rendered fat having a low melting point. I was actually thinking that may be a problem to contend with. I'll experiment with that some this spring. Sounds like your backcountry diet is similar to what I am looking for.

 

[unm1136]

I am a big fan of both those things... Most of the charcuterie I have taken will get greasy on you as the fat softens. I don't like that it leaves my hands greasy, and by extension my clothes (we wear clothes as napkins, right?) in bear country. Not a major problem, but one to be aware of, particularly since I normally sleep in my hunting clothes.. Pemmican is indeed a concentrated source of calories, I like mine berry heavy, and with nuts(Phrasing...PHRASING!)...To package your pemmican, use sausage casings. Natural are a bit more trouble to deal with, but are fully edible. Fibrous are a bit more of a pain, but packing out sausage skins is lighter than plastic bags. You can stuff different sized casings with different weighed amounts of pemmican, and have meals measured out. For variety, roast a cased bit of pemmican over a fire (don't loose all the fat!), or break it up in hot water for a quick stew, or make a patty and sear it on hot rock. It is after all, essentially a sausage, made with dried meat rather than fresh.

If paleo is a big deal for you, rinsed quinoa and amaranth are good substitutes for cous cous, which is hard durum wheat, and if you rinse the quinoa yourself you can sprout it before drying it and packaging it. If you are primal, I have made use of par cooked brown rice in the woods without issue. At my local Sprouts I have found a marinated string cheese that seems to do well enough without refrigeration. Good salami and peperoni should do well, as they are usually dried and fermented, but if the days heat up the texture will suffer a bit. Still tasty, still edible. I like to fry salami and peperoni anyway to get "chips". I have made ham jerky before, but the commercial stuff turns black as it dries. Still tastes OK. Dried hamburger and dried vegetables with your grain/grass/seed of choice will make a quick, easily packaged pilaf. 4 oz dried, cooked, ground meat (not paleo, but breadcrumbs help save the texture when dehydrating, so you don't end up with gravel) with 4 oz dried vegetables (just buy IQF mixed veg and throw them in the dehydrator), and 2-4 oz of rice, cous cous, quinoa, or amaranth will make a tasty, quick cooking freezer bag dinner, just over a pound of total food. Rice noodles are also something to play with here, if you desire more variety, since they rehydrate quickly and rice is sorta primal. I have packed pre-cooked bacon (thick sliced) for a week, the weeping of the fat in higher temps is noticeable, though, and as the fat runs so does some of the smokey flavor. Smoked salmon jerky, and individual foil packaged servings of both Spam and Tuna, Chicken, and salmon could provide variety. Another success I have had is making habanero spanish rice (hot Rotel, onions, garlic, cumin, and brown rice, cooked together in the risotto method and dehydrated. If not primal/paleo drying a can of black beans and adding them to the mix is nice)...Six ounces in the pack, filling, and a full meal. A squeeze tube of Lusty Monk Chipotle Mustard almost always find its way into my pack, and it mixes well with all of the above. A while back I posted a recipe which as a bit of simple sugars (the marshmallows) with dried fruit, protein powder, nuts, oats, and chicharrones, which is not exactly paleo/primal, but not too far off.

pat

 

[Poser]

Pat,

Sweet idea! I haven't considered casing Pemmican. Do you run your pemmican through a stuffer while it is still warm (would that even work?) or (more likley) you are manually stuffing the casings with it. Hmm. Good idea!

 

[unm1136]

I am kinda stupid....When I was first making sausage I didn't realize that while stuffing the casings you didn't need a die in grinder. So I re-ground everything as I stuffed the casings. Historically, pemmican was hand stuffed into casings and twisted into links. Let it chill, and feed it in chunks into the grinder with a die in place (a larger die makes the fruit and nuts less mangled, and the fine die makes everything more uniform) and sausage horn on. The re-grinding makes it more malleable as it gets pressed into the casings. When I learned to make sausage we chilled our grinders/dies in an ice bath to prevent the fat from separating. Starting with the sausage chilled was a requirement, too, so the first time I made Pemmican...I also use fibrous casings to pack a pound or so of corned beef hash into the mountains... No die this time, mix chopped corned beef and potatoes (I use Ore-Ida O'Brien potatoes) and stuff a pound into a fibrous casing. Will last a couple-three days if frozen before you leave, and again, the casing is lighter than a plastic bag, and dare I say, biodegradable. Remove the hash and pan fry. I have not yet stuffed Chili into a Fibrous casing, but a sausage making text that I inherited from my grandfather recommends making a batch of chili con carne and stuffing it in a casing...So if you have a paleo/primal chili recipe....

pat

 

[Poser]

Ok, so you stuff your pemmican after it has been chilled. That makes sense. I have a vertical stuffer which makes quick work of the task. I always chill everything that comes in contact with the meat and also place the meat in the freezer for 15-20 minutes before stuffing for the reasons that you mentioned -helps the find and venison to "bind" together.

 

[Hunt'nFish]

Refresh my memory...the reason for rendering fat is to increase the digestive efficiency?

I'm w/ Becca, although I love my jerky & pepperoni sticks, I'm not sure I could go a week on just them. My body likes a mix of foods. And when we're talking about 1-1.5lb of food/day I'll pack the extra weight to have the variety. That said, I think we ALL over pack on food. Perhaps the thing to do is cut back on the food and replace 2 days worth w/ the suggested Pemmican & Charcuterie type foods. I know for me some hard salami and a cup of Lipton chicken noodle soup will do me fine. But I'm also a big guy and a little calorie deficit won't hurt me one bit.
I find these pemmican sausages interesting.
Hunt'nFish

 

[unm1136]

Refresh my memory...the reason for rendering fat is to increase the digestive efficiency?

I'm w/ Becca, although I love my jerky & pepperoni sticks, I'm not sure I could go a week on just them. My body likes a mix of foods. And when we're talking about 1-1.5lb of food/day I'll pack the extra weight to have the variety. That said, I think we ALL over pack on food. Perhaps the thing to do is cut back on the food and replace 2 days worth w/ the suggested Pemmican & Charcuterie type foods. I know for me some hard salami and a cup of Lipton chicken noodle soup will do me fine. But I'm also a big guy and a little calorie deficit won't hurt me one bit.
I find these pemmican sausages interesting.
Hunt'nFish

I don't recall it having anything to do with digestibility. When you render fat you remove most of the protein (scrap meat) and water. You end up with pure fat. The research I did the last time Dave and I discussed this is that animal fat is usually only 65-85% fat. The rest is proteins, sugars, water, and the other bits and pieces you find in cells. The use of dried meat and berries, and a purified fat creates a kind of pre-historic MRE...It is shelf stable and does not need refrigeration. By rendering the fat you remove the things that lower its smoke point, and attract oxygen causing it to go rancid, and effectively remove the stuff bacteria needs to get a foothold. Rendered fat is less likely to spoil, just like dried fruit and dried meat are preserved. If you are related to a dietitian, then you can play with the balance of macro-nutrients to an extent. A casing will also reduce the chances of oxygenation of the very outer layer of fat.

Some playing around with the numbers shows pemmican yielding between 130-180 Kcal, less if you use more fruit, more if you use more nuts, averaging 150 Kcal/oz is not too hard. The fact that 60% of your calories is coming from fat might cause some consternation, but if you have a Big Mick or a Whipper, you are nearly there, and the pemmican arguably has better ingredients (grass fed beef fat is higher in Omega 3s ect), and less simple carbs(no grains, just sugars and carbs from fruit and nuts). The big burger comparison tips even farther away for the meals with the fries and drinks, and I enjoy mass market burgers when I am on vacation, so a hunt with even one meal a day being a pemmican variant would not trouble me at all, even over a week. Three meals a day, a week might be all I can take before I go nuts.

pat

 

[Poser]

Good answer on the rendered fat. I was mainly thinking that I could use the Venison Pemmican + concentrated sports drink (+possibly one light, hot item like couscous) for a large calorie, but very lightweight dinner. Meal variation could be obtained with lunch and breakfast, though I would rely heavily upon venison and/or duck jerky and dry cured sausages + dried fruit, nuts, oatmeal etc.

That being said, I'm not opposed to throwing a MH meal or two in the mix to change things up, I just don't seem to harness much energy from those types of meals.

 

[Ray]

Helpful tip on rendering fat. Do not use ox tail. I learned the hard way that it has a lot of collagen in it. When rendered it turns into a goop rather than hard fat. It also tastes "wrong" when next to proper rendered fat.

The next game critter I take I plan on rendering some of its fat to see how it tastes compared to beef fat. Maybe I'll put some time in this year for a spring black bear hunt. Hard to get the time most springs.

 

[Poser]

Ray,

I have experimented with rendering venison fat with good results. You can read about it here: http://gocarnivore.com/2013/12/04/rendered-venison-fat-lard/
I'll often sear pieces of backstrap or even cook eggs in it. Or, sometimes, I'll mix it with a bit of rendered bacon fat or butter, just to vary things up.

Rendered duck and goose fat is incredible. I use leftover pieces of skin and, depending on the type of bird, the gobs of fat found around their tail area. I'll use it for all kinds of things, even fried french fries in it. You'll pay $20 for 10 oz of this at the grocery store. Sad thing is, most duck hunters make no use of it.

Also, I have found that when smoking venison, I'll use a light coat of (non-hydrogenated) pork lard instead of the (more popular) coating of bacon. Lard has a very neutral flavor to it and doesn't tend to come in and dominate the taste of meat the way bacon does. This way, you get more of the subtle flavors of venison instead of a piece of meat that taste like bacon.