Try New Foods

[DougPaul]

Yea, even if they didn't like it back then, it certainly served its purpose. There are certainly enough trail foods out there whose taste I despise, but when you have to eat and your options are limited you have no choice. I wonder how much of a scent pemmican throws off.

I suspect that it didn't have a very strong scent unless it starts to spoil.

One of the reasons I hesitate bringing jerky on anything more than a day-hike is its aroma. Its usually quite strong, even the more organic non-processed variety. I reason if I can smell it, so can every other critter who might have a hankerin' to investigate on an overnighter.

I suspect that much (most?) of the smell and flavor of commercial jerky is the marinade and spices.

I made some jerky once years ago using just beef (flank steak?) with no marinade or spices. IIRC, it had a mild taste and smell.

Doug

 

[The Feathered Hat]

True pemmican tastes like sawdust, at least to me. I'm a big fan of landjaeger, which is a dried sausage that tastes like Italian salami. Usually the sticks are about the length of a stick of beef jerky and maybe a quarter or half-inch thick. It's a little heavier than jerky, but on shorter trips -- less than a week, say -- I'm not terribly obsessed about weight, and I don't even think about it for day trips. Landjaeger isn't as tough as jerky and doesn't get stuck in your teeth like jerky often does. It's not so easy to find, however. I have my daughter ship me some from California. (Saag's Sausage in the Bay Area makes the best U.S. landjaeger, I think.)

 

[J.Dub]

FWIW, there's a similar thread going on currently at SP. Some interesting new products have been mentioned that I wasn't familiar with...

Link here.

 

[Little Rickie]

True pemmican tastes like sawdust,

Now I'm not interested in it at all. I don't care if it can be stuck in the ground for a year and then dug up. I'll stick with hard sussages.

Landjaeger is nice, there are lots of other sussage type meats that are available that taste much better than sawdust.

 

[Craig]

"Food technologies" just desn't seem appetizing.

Though I do like cliff bars.

pemmican-what's wrong with pepperoni and a hand full of dried fruit?

Let me try and explain the difference this way….

I am hiking the Lafayette loop on a warm summer’s weekend. I make my way around to the summit of Lafayette to a crowd of 50+ folks of diverse social/economic/political/cultural backgrounds. I find a spot amongst the crowd to stop and have a snack.

I remove my pack, flip open the brain and pull out a BIG O’l honk’n sausage or pepperoni or some such and proceed to eat it the long way.
Now maybe it’s just me, but with the dirty glances and loathsome glares that would be shot my way, would surely further damage my already fragile self esteem.

However:

If after removing my pack and flipping open my brain, I was to pull out a hunk of pemmican I would certainly be asked, “What is that”?

To which I would respond:

“This is pemmican. It is a high quality, calorie dense, 40-20-40 macro-nutrient balanced meal first used by the Eskimos. Thereafter, it was adopted by the early European expedition explores such as Shackleton, Scott and Cook among others. In recent times it has been adopted by ultra endurance athletes from around the world. Not many folks know about this stuff, I’m not surprised you asked.
I guess if it’s good enough for those folks, its good enough for me.”

The resulting attention and further questions regarding this highly priced product would further stroke my ego and help reaffirm my bad self….

See the difference?

 

[Little Rickie]

Seeing it as you have described I can appreciate the difference but does it still taste like saw dust?

I was into making my own hardtac and had a similar experience in a crowd of campers and thought I was real cool until I chipped a tooth on the handtack.

 

[carla]

Sport Beans are fun

Sport beans are yummy and sort of fun too.

http://www.sportbeans.com/

Made by JellyBelly--they are in jellybean shape, and taste like jelly beans, but apparently infused with all sorts of good things for quick energy and electrolyte replacement (like gels and the blocks described earlier).

The only problem is that there are so few in a pack.

 

[Stan]

"In my various expeditions I have naturally had some experience with pemmican." So says RADM Robert Peary, polar explorer of a century ago, in his book, Secrets of Polar Travel, in which he describes the diets of his men and sled dogs.

Here is his recipe, a concoction served up to both man and dog:

2/3 lean beef dried until friable then ground fine
1/3 beef fat
a little sugar
a few raisins

"Of course no one but the makers knew how much cat, dog, mule and horse meat masqueraded in the pemmican ..."

This concern, along with the fact that some pemmican which he had purchased previously proved defective or inadequate: broken glass which killed his dogs, fillers that had insufficient nourishment and energy to sustain high productivity under Arctic conditions, improperly canned pemmican that spoiled beyond use.

Beware of the provider of your food. Dishonesty and corruption, now as then, is a risk to your health. Read the labels on some of this crap masquerading as food or energy bars and you may conclude that mixing your own trail foods to suit your own energy requirements has merit.

At least, you won't have to butcher the weaker dogs to feed the remainder of the pack as the expedition progressed and the load was lightened.