My pemmican recipe: lean meat and rendered tallow, made with an oven and a thermometer. Why the 160°F step matters, calories per batch and safe storage.
Updated: November 12, 2026
Short answer: Pemmican is lean meat that has been cooked, dried hard, ground to a powder, and bound with rendered fat. I've made pemmican, and the recipe below is mine. You can make it with an oven, a pot, and a food thermometer. The step most home recipes skip is the one that matters most: heat the meat to 160°F before you dry it, because a dehydrator or a low oven alone won't reliably kill E. coli or Salmonella. Calories are high: by calculation, a batch made from 2 pounds of meat comes to roughly 3,000 to 3,200 calories, and a 3-pound batch roughly 4,500 to 4,800. Shelf life is where you need to be honest with yourself. Nobody has tested homemade pemmican the way commercial food is tested, so I won't put a number on it. The closest official numbers are for home-dried jerky: 2 weeks in a sealed container at room temperature from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, and 1 to 2 months from USDA. Keep only a few weeks of bars in the pantry and let the freezer be your long-term storage.
Perfect world: You follow the USDA jerky method to the letter. Lean whole-muscle meat, sliced thin, heated to 160°F and checked with a thermometer, dried at a steady 130°F to 140°F or higher, then ground, mixed with clean rendered tallow, sealed, dated, and frozen. You eat it in rotation like any other stored food.
SHTF: The freezer is gone and nobody is coming with a resupply truck. This is the job pemmican was built for: a lot of calories in a small, dense package that doesn't need cooking. What keeps it edible when the power's out is how dry you got the meat, how clean the fat is, and how well it's sealed from air, heat, and moisture. What doesn't change in SHTF: you still need steady heat to cook and dry the meat safely. Sun drying is not recommended for meat. If you can't heat and dry with a steady heat source, don't try to make pemmican. Stock commercially packaged jerky and other shelf-stable proteins instead (more on that below).
My recipe:
That's it: meat and fat. Some people add dried fruit or a little honey. That's optional, and it adds moisture (see below). If you add it, keep it small, like 2 ounces of dried blueberries or 1 tablespoon of honey.
Never give honey, or pemmican made with honey, to a baby under 1 year old. CDC says honey can contain the bacteria that cause infant botulism.
Low-cost beginner setup (no special appliances):
A dehydrator with an adjustable thermostat is nice to have. A freeze dryer is not needed for any of this.
Use lean, whole-muscle cuts. Extension food safety guidance recommends whole muscle over ground meat for home drying because it's easier to make safe. Lean matters too: fat left on the meat turns rancid in storage, and rancid fat is one of the main ways stored pemmican goes bad.
Any of the meats in my recipe work: beef eye of round, sirloin tip, bison, venison, or elk. With venison and other wild game, USDA notes that game often carries a lot of fecal bacteria, how much depending on the shot and the field dressing, and a deer carcass usually isn't chilled as fast as beef. So the 160°F step matters even more with game. If the shot or the field dressing let gut contents touch the meat, don't use that meat for pemmican. The National Center for Home Food Preservation says to use it only in ways where it gets thoroughly cooked.
Skip pork, bear, and wild boar for this project. Drying does not reliably kill the Trichinella parasite, and freezing doesn't reliably kill the kinds found in wild game.
Deer and elk carry one more risk: chronic wasting disease. It has never been reported in people, but CDC tells hunters in areas where it's found to check state wildlife and health department guidance, strongly consider having the deer or elk tested before eating the meat, and skip meat from any animal that tests positive, looks sick, acts strangely, or was found dead.
Partly freeze the meat so it slices cleanly. Cut strips no thicker than a quarter inch. Trim off and throw away all the fat you can see. You'll add clean rendered fat back later, and that fat is far more stable than raw fat left on the meat.
This is the step that keeps people from getting sick. USDA's guidance for home-dried meat is to heat it to 160°F (165°F for poultry) before you dehydrate it. The reason: in a dehydrator or warm oven, evaporating moisture soaks up the heat, so the meat stays cool while it dries. By the time it finally heats up, the bacteria have become more heat resistant. In university lab tests on venison, disease-causing E. coli survived up to 10 hours of drying at temperatures as high as 145°F.
Two tested ways to do it:
Either way, use a thermometer. Don't guess by color.
Drain the strips and lay them on racks in a single layer, close but not touching. Dry in a dehydrator or oven at 140°F, or at your oven's lowest setting. USDA wants the drying temperature held at 130°F to 140°F or higher the whole time, so check the actual temperature with a thermometer between the racks instead of trusting the dial.
For jerky, you stop when a cooled piece cracks but doesn't break when you bend it. For pemmican, keep going. You want strips that snap and crumble, because moisture is what lets bacteria and mold grow, and you need the meat dry enough to grind to a powder. Precooked strips dry faster than raw ones. Start checking after about 3 hours.
When it's done, blot off any beads of fat with a clean paper towel.
Run the dried meat through a blender or food processor until it looks like coarse powder or fine flakes. No blender? Put it in a heavy cloth bag and pound it. That's how it was done for generations.
Weigh the powder and write the number down. That number tells you how much tallow to use in Step 7. Expect roughly 4 ounces of powder for every pound of raw meat, so 2 to 3 lbs of meat gives you about 1/2 to 3/4 lb of powder.
Tallow is the fat of beef, bison, sheep, deer, or elk, melted down and strained. Ask a butcher or a local meat processor for beef suet or trim if you don't have your own.
A simple stovetop or slow cooker method from university extension:
For pemmican, pour off only the clear fat and leave any watery layer and sediment behind. Water in your fat is water in your pemmican.
Hot tallow causes serious burns. Keep kids and pets out of the kitchen, use a heavy pot, and never leave it on the burner unattended.
These numbers are calculated from USDA FoodData Central values for my recipe's weight ranges. They are not lab tested.
| Batch | Approx. finished weight | Total calories | 2-ounce bars (about 57 g) | Calories per bar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 lbs meat + 1/2 lb tallow | about 1 lb | about 3,040 to 3,230 | 8 | about 380 to 400 |
| 3 lbs meat + 3/4 lb tallow | about 1 1/2 lbs | about 4,550 to 4,840 | 12 | about 380 to 400 |
The low end is bison (the lowest calorie meat in my list, by USDA data) and the high end is sirloin tip. Eye of round, venison, and elk fall in between. Adding 2 ounces of dried blueberries puts about 180 calories in the batch, and 1 tablespoon of honey about 60.
How the math works. Drying removes water, and water has no calories. So all the calories in the raw meat are still in the dried powder. USDA says a pound of meat ends up around 4 ounces as jerky, which lines up with USDA's own data that lean raw meat is about three-quarters water. That's where the "roughly equal weight" comes from: 2 to 3 lbs of meat dries to about 1/2 to 3/4 lb of powder, and you match it with 1/2 to 3/4 lb of tallow. Tallow is almost pure fat at about 9 calories per gram, so it carries about two-thirds of the calories in a bar. USDA FoodData Central lists beef tallow but not bison tallow, so the math uses the beef tallow value for both.
To figure your own batch, add up the calories of everything you put in, then divide by how many equal bars you cut. That holds no matter how dry your meat ended up. These numbers are a ceiling: a little fat and meat always gets left behind in the pan or on the racks.
Here's the honest version. I could not find a tested shelf life for homemade pemmican from USDA or any extension service. You'll see claims of years or decades online. None of those come from controlled testing of a home recipe, and your kitchen isn't a food plant.
What the official sources do give you:
| Item | Room temperature | Refrigerator | Freezer | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home-dried jerky | 2 weeks sealed (NCHFP); 1 to 2 months (USDA) | Longer, recommended | Longer, recommended | USDA FSIS, NCHFP |
| Home-rendered tallow, sealed | Up to 6 months, cool and dark | About 1 year | About 2 years | University of Wyoming Extension |
| Commercially packaged jerky | 12 months | USDA FSIS |
Meat processors who make shelf-stable dried products, pemmican included, check safety by measuring the product's pH and water activity against set limits. You can't measure either one in a home kitchen.
My take for a home batch: keep a few weeks of bars in the pantry for rotation and treat the freezer as your real long-term storage. In SHTF, when the freezer is gone, the bars you made carefully and sealed well are what you'll have. Eat the oldest first and check every bar before you eat it.
Throw it out if it smells rancid or sour, if you see any mold, or if it feels damp. When in doubt, throw it out.
For where pemmican fits in a whole storage plan, see my long-term food storage guide. If you're packing it for a go-bag, read bug out bag food first, since a bag sitting in a hot car is the worst storage there is.
Do I need a freeze dryer to make pemmican? No. An oven or a basic dehydrator does the drying. A freeze dryer is a different kind of preservation and isn't part of this process. If you're deciding whether to buy one for other foods, see freeze dryer vs dehydrator.
Can I use ground beef? You can, but whole-muscle cuts are the safer choice for home drying. Bacteria are harder to get rid of in ground meat. If you use ground meat, the 160°F heating step is not optional.
Can I skip the 160°F step if my dehydrator goes up to 160°F? No. The dial setting isn't the meat temperature. Evaporation keeps the meat cooler than the air around it until most of the water is gone. Heat the meat to 160°F with a wet method first, or heat the dried strips in the oven afterward, and check with a thermometer.
Is pemmican a complete survival food? It's dense calories, protein, and fat, and that's valuable. It isn't a balanced diet on its own. Use it as one part of your storage, alongside your other foods.
What if I can't do any of this safely? Then don't make it. Commercially packaged jerky is made under USDA inspection and keeps about 12 months unopened. Rotate it with your other stored food.