Whole blueberries were a spectacular failure.
I can imagine. A friend and I are doing a pilot project with pemmican. We're starting with more or less traditional recipes - 1 part lean meat, 1 part rendered fat and maybe 1/2 part berries and will be working through several iterations, changing one thing at a time so we can understand what made a difference. Maybe will work in a tiny bit of salt; we'll see.
I knew blueberries (or any whole berry, for that matter) wouldn't be easily freeze-dried, so I put the mush on them with a potato masher. Then I got to thinking that liquid would show back up in the pemmican while it was aging, and that wasn't good. So I ended up mashing them through a big tea strainer. Did the same thing with cranberries (step 2 or so recipe).
Everything freeze dried up real nicely, AND I got lots of blueberry/cranberry juice to mix with our ivermectin doses.
On the meat issue, I already have a lot of cooked freeze-dried sliced lean beef, so we'll use that to start. The second one will be some uncooked bottom round that was dehydrated at low temp. When it was finished, I noticed that the original 2+ lbs of meat had reduced to almost 1/2 lb, so there's a 4:1 reduction there. I'm just going to assume the same thing on the freeze-dried beef and we'll see how it goes. One thing I'm really looking forward to is using some Alaskan red salmon mixed with cherries. I can't wait to see how that turns out!
We're doing this modern style (freeze dryer, dehydrator, blender, etc.) but will probably do an in-class grid-down demo when we get around to presenting it. Using a mortar & pestle, river rocks, whatever ....
Our goal is to have all this done and put together in a nice PowerPoint so we can present the project to as many groups as want to learn about the ins and outs of pemmican, plus we'll have tasting samples. This is tentatively scheduled for Septemberish at the moment.
