Recipes

TL;DR:

Chop. Heat in kettle. Strain into bowl or carafe, dropping solids into second bowl. Wait a few minutes so that particles in carafe sink to the bottom. Pour liquid tallow into chosen container, leaving the bottom layer of particles.

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Old:

Slow-cook the stuff whole. You'll have a lot of leftover fatty solids, if you don't mind gorging for a few days. Drawback is it spends a long time at hot temperature, so I have some worry about oxidation.

For maximum extraction, cube it and pulse it a bit in a blender, to rip apart membranes. Then either dry-render or wet-render. Haven't tried this yet. Maybe try it without the blender, so as to create less dishes. Just finely chop it. This would be easier if it's semi-frozen. 2-4 hours in cold water should be about right if the bags are one kg each. Will try with blender, I think, for my first time, so my results can be compared to the online recipes I've read.

One interesting trick to prevent oxidation might be to add berries, herbs or ascorbate during rendering, but I don't know the consequences. Might it create an environment ripe for botulism bacteria? This is why pressure-cooking jars of finished tallow is a neat idea, although pressure-cooking might defeat the point of adding antioxidants.

GROCERIES

• Non-iodized salt (MUST be non-iodized)
• Cabbage. You should know how much each head weighs – it'll be on your receipt from the grocery store. For every liter of space in your Fido jars, buy 1.5 kg of cabbage.
• (Optional) A few carrots, straight shape with uniform thickness, to act as a weight-spreader

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EQUIPMENT

• Cutting board (two if you're a team)
• Knife (two if you're a team)
• Giant bowl or kettle, maybe several bowls. I prefer 2 liters of space for every kg of cabbage you have. So 5 kg of cabbage -> find a 10-liter kettle.
• 1.5L or larger Fido jars.
• (Optional) Disposable gloves
• (Optional) A plate or extra cutting board to temporarily place some of your cabbage on.
• (Optional) A tiny vase, salt shaker, sturdy shot glass, or other glass item

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STAGE 1

Boil your glass jars and knife in a kettle. Sterilize your cutting boards by pouring boiling water over them.

Wash your hands. Every time you touch something you shouldn't, wash your hands again. Learn to wash your hands properly (Google it).

Peel off outermost cabbage leaves and throw them away. Cut away blemishes.

Peel off a few more leaves, for use as "hats" later.

Cut cabbage in thin strips, or in thick strips and dice them. Either makes it easy to work with. Dicing thin strips is redundant though.

As your cutting board gets full, keep dumping the cut cabbage into a giant bowl (I use a ten-liter kettle). If you have to split a cabbage head into two separate bowls, take note of how much you split off if you want to give them the proper amount of salt (this is why it's easier to just have one giant bowl).

Once you've filled your bowl to about 75%, stop. It's easier to work with two 75% bowls than one 100% bowl.

Add an appropriate amount of salt. In American, this is around 3 tablespoons of non-iodized salt per 5 pounds of cabbage, or I guess 1.5-2.0 ml per 100 g cabbage, i.e. slightly over 1 tablespoon (15 ml) per kg. More finely ground salt will be more dense, so use slightly less.

Take into account the fact you're not using the cores or outermost leaves of your cabbage heads, so they weigh a bit less than they did on the grocery receipt. It's not important to get this number very exactly though. If you've spread the contents of a cabbage head into multiple bowls and don't know how much went into each, just make sure to get the total sum of salt correct.

Now put on gloves if you have. Use your hands to mix the salt with the cabbage. Mix well because uneven salting may give ground to spoilage bacteria later (some people do make unsalted sauerkraut, but it's down to luck). If you're using coarse salt, you may have to gather granules from the bottom of the bowl repeatedly.

Take a break of minimum 30 minutes. The salt will soften the cabbage.

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STAGE 2

Put on new gloves. Pick up fistfuls of your proto-sauerkraut and drop them into Fido jars. As the jars get full, press the contents down to make more space. You'll be surprised at how much can fit.

Once a jar is filled to a couple of centimeters below where the "neck" of the jar starts, take some of the cabbage leaves you saved and put them on top of the contents, covering them. These prevent tiny fragments of cabbage from floating to the surface.

At this point, it may be enough to put a tiny vase or salt shaker on top of all this and close the lid of the jar. The vase should end up pressing the contents down. If it doesn't, cut some carrots lengthwise and lay them on (you may have to shorten the carrots), then put the vase on top of all that. I like to put an additional carrot on top of the other carrots, lying across, to press them all down. Cut a flat surface on the top of this carrot for the vase to find a stable ground.

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You're done!

Now, for the first week, come back daily and burp the jars, just in case. A lot of gases build up. The Fido jars able to handle it though, says the internet. Also if you can find a relatively cool place (13C?) to put them for the first week (and then room temperature for the following weeks), this supposedly enhances the taste.

NOTE: I have fears about freezing it, residual water may freeze and create microfractures in the block, and then I'm not sure about shelf-life.

NOTE: Making pemmican has little point unless you are going traveling. If you just want to store large amounts of Paleo food outside the freezer, drying meat and rendering tallow would do the job, both will keep perfectly well on their own.

NOTE: If you just want to compress food for bringing with you somewhere that also has a freezer, or stock your own freezer, you can create different kinds of "forcemeat", e.g. kalvsylta, polsa and leverpastej.

General principles of pemmican still apply: reduce water as much as possible, and fill in any "air gaps" with fat or gelatinous broth. The difference being that pemmican has zero water, while the other dishes retain some water.

Ok, finally the recipe for pemmican:

Melt tallow and stir it into pulverized dry meat. Use less tallow rather than more because you don't want so much that some oil separates from the powder. If you'll want to pressure-cook it later, observe the mixture while the tallow is still in the melted state so that you can be confident nothing will separate when you stuff a glass jar with the mixture and boil it.

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