Canning Corned Beef

I am wondering about canning corned beef. I bought up a bunch over the holiday and froze it. Now I would like to can it so I can use it to make corned beef hash. I remember getting the canned corned beef as a child with the key to open it. Now I can only find the stuff w/ the potatoes already in it and that is not at all what I am looking for.

Here's the thing, that canned corned beef was relatively dry and really very fat. I am wondering how one could come the closest to copying that? I think cook it first, definitely, to make it more tender. I am hesitant to pack it in liquid since I want a drier end product but I am wondering since the commercial stuff from my childhood was so dense how to safely can such a dense product. I am going to be canning in 1/2 pint jars. Can you go drier/denser if you get a tin can canner?

Thanks,
Ali

(this is a cross/re-post, I accidentally responded to a corned beef post in the survival forum so I am moving it here)

I'm assuming that you got corned beef brisket and stuck that in your freezer. There are two ways to can that in jars... as steaks/chunks or as shreds/ground. Typically, the stuff in the tins is shredded/ground, normally precooked and then shredded/ground.

You can certainly do the same thing following the ground meat instructions. If you slow cook or braise in a crock pot or oven, just trim off any obvious fat beforehand and then squeeze out and drain most of the liquid from the cooked meat after you've shredded it. Pack the jars tightly, and add a little hot liquid to reach headspace... the results will still be pretty dry.

Since corned beef is a cured product, you can also pack it in steaks or chunks like "raw pack" meat, following those instructions. Just trim of any obvious fat from the brisket stuff the jars and away you go. It will fall apart in the jar after cooking, and certainly while forking it out, with the characteristic texture and dryness of tinned CB.

My MIL & SIL in the UK do the precooked and ground method with their corned beef all the time, and I've done the raw pack it with corned moose steaks with good results.

Mmmmmm... moose, I miss moose. My poor hubby had never had good moose, he was pretty down on hunting when he met me. His family had always trophy hunted and used their table saw to butcher themselves. Not to mention between his mother and aunt they still don't have enough culinary skills to be qualified to boil water. Anyway... He came home (from the slope) to a freezer full of a spike I shot and had professionally butchered. (Hey! It was my first big game.) He did a 180* and the non-hunter is now a 10x better marksman and uses his incredible luck to pull some great lottery hunts.

Sigh... some day I can come home for good.

Back to corned beef! It sounds like what your family across the pond is doing what I am looking for. I don't have a meat grinder. I should really get the attachment for my kitchen aide. I wonder about putting it in the food processor?

So when you're talking about adding water, you aren't expecting it to flow down into the meat are you? Kind of confused by the step of squeezing out the liquid to turn and add liquid back. Can you explain the objective behind that? What about using the fluid it's cooked in to pack it with?

I think I am going to try both ways. When you do your raw pack, do you use the pickling spices that come with it?

You want to get most of the moisture out of the meat so it packs down really tight. CB soaks up A LOT of water slow cooking and braising, which makes it totally soupy baby food goop after you can it (blech!!). So you only want it a little moist when you pack the jars. The liquid you put on top is only to adjust your head space and keep the top of the meat from getting funny-colored (edible, just looks weird), but you aren't trying to have that soak down into the rest of the meat. You're likely to get a few cups of water out of a brisket, but only add back about a tablespoon per jar.

Using the cooking juices for packing is excellent as long as you've separated out any major fat. I normally chill the juices overnight and lift off the hard fat layer, just like stocks, and then heat it back up for packing.

A food processor or blender on pulse would make a serviceable CB grind. Or you could fork shred it if you have nothing better to do since CB shreds super-easy after it's cooked down. But grinders are soooo handy -- mmmm caribou sausage!!

When I pack mine in chunks, I normally divvy up the included spice pack in the bottom of my jars. It's usually not enough for all the jars since you want about a teaspoon of spices per lb of meat (1.5 lbs = 1 pint), so I'll add some generic pickling spice mix to round it out. When you process, the heat drives most of the liquid out of the meat and you end up with a pretty substantial amount of juice in the jar but not usually enough to reach the top, so I shake/rotate the jars every few weeks to make sure the spices soak in evenly. Then I just drain out the juice before pulling the meat out if I'm making a dry hash.