Canned meat: What the heck is up with that?

Oggie,
My family didn't can meat in my lifetime either. I have only done it in the last few years. In my general experience, canning in general is only done by people on this forum. We/they are the ones that keep the canning jar companies in business. I honestly know NO OTHER people that can anything. It is not surprising you have never seen/heard of it. I think meatballs - home canned- are too dry. But maybe it is just MY meatballs. I like the canned beef for mixing with gravy and pouring over noodles - fast meal. The chicken does best in casseroles or chickensalad. You can't broil or grill it after it's canned (watch someone prove me wrong). It definately has it's place in our house as far as quick-to-fix meals are concerned. But we like it grilled much better.

It takes less energy to keep your freezer going than your fridge.

SPAM is not "meat"
I'm not sure anyone really knows ( or wants to know) what it is

It MIGHT have cats in there too

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Last year we lived through a 17 day power outage. I would have lost everything in a freezer. I can't afford a generator now, and I'd be heartbroken to go through all that work and lose everything. Mary.

When I started seeing the meat canning posts, it turned me off too. The thought of canned meat just doesn't appeal.

Real canned meat, prime meat canned in glass canning jars is available in northern illinois from eickman's processing at seward, il. This is not the "cutters and canners" canned beef in gravy stuff, but real honest meat and pork in broth. It is a little pricy, but i hear it's really good. It is just the two of us, and we don't eat much meat.

I want to try canning vension so bad!! My DH is pretty leary about it yet, but from what you all said, I think I could convert him if it's any good.
We got two small deer this year and since we were not at home and it was warm we had to take to the processors. THey are in the freezer now.
After school ends this semester I make thaw some out and can it. I think it would be helpful next semester when I'll be really busy and need quick meals.
I'm still hoping to get one more deer this year to put up.

Should I try canning the roasts or the steaks first?

I'd save steaks for grilling and do the roasts in chunks as stew meat

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Re: Earlier post on canning dried beans......

Some dried beans can take 2 hours to cook. Many suggested methods to cook them recommend soaking over night, then cooking the next day. Even the quick soak method takes more than an hour.

When a big batch of dried beans are canned, they become heat and eat. Just empty the jar into a pot, heat, add seasonings if not done in the jar. Turns dried peas and beans into "convenience" foods.

Lee

I'm with NCLee - precooking beans, meat and veggies means a meal ready to eat in minutes. Just dump in a pan, heat and eat.

I've got lots of canned meat too - turkey, beef and chicken mainly. It's so nice to open a jar on a busy night, add noodles and veggies and have a meal in 20 mins. Plus like everyone else said, I'm not filling the freezer and hoping the power doesn't go off in a storm.

I also have lots of hamburger "rocks" which is cooked and drained, then dehydrated ground beef. It stores in a jar on a shelf and works GREAT for tacos, casseroles, and anything else you'd use hamburger meat for.

Check out the survival and emergency forum down below on this board. There are lots of people with lots of great info on canning, drying and preserving foods.

That.....and I can't stand the smell of cooking beans. So instead of cooking beans everytime I want beans I can in large batches, and get the smell once.
Plus home canned beans are so much cheeper than store bought canned beans

i've lost more than one freezer full of food due to power outages or freezer failure. it breaks your heart to see so much food spoil. i can venison every time i get one.

i can venison for several reasons...

the above freezer failure scenario is one.

my family has always canned venison, so i do it and will pass on my experience.

it is awesome tasty and if you never had it you wouldn't understand.

when i pull out my three year old canned venison and you pull out your three year old frozen meat, which would you rather consume...seriously?

i cannot legally hunt deer in the spring or summer, so i need long term storage. further more, i cannot count on getting deer year to year. sometimes it just doesn't happen. i was totally skunked last year and the year before...but i had canned meat to hold me over.

it is very convenient to cooked meat ready to go. canned venison makes for an easy meal. add flour and brown in a skillet as a base for an awesome gravy or stew. add boullion and veggies for a quick and tasty soup. you get the idea...it's pre-cooked and ready to go.

i have a system after 25+ years of hunting. i can most of the hind quarters. the loin and medallions (fish) get sliced and frozen or eaten right away (fish...super-yummy), lol. the shanks of the front and rear quarters get frozen for the crock pot. the neck roast gets frozen for a roast. the front shoulders get sawn in two for 4 awesome roasts.

when i finally get a decent grinder, i will resume making bologna from my top secret maple venison bologna recipe. i love ground venison and the carcass has lots of meat left over for grinding. nothing tops venison chili.

another recipe i learned but never actually tried is to boil the carcass and use that extra 10 pounds of meat, give or take, and the broth to make venison scrapple. just add corn meal and the seasoning of your choice and mold it in bread pans. i imagine the meat gained from boiling the carcass would make a very tasty barbeque if you added the sauce. just freeze it and enjoy all winter. can you imagine if an entire family cooked off 4 or 5 carcasses in a big kettle? that is about 50 pounds of meat no one counted on before!

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this message has probably been edited to correct typos, spelling errors and to improve grammar...

"All that is gold does not glitter..."

Lots of people here in western WA hunt and it is NOT cold enough to keep you meat frozen almost ever. We get only a few weeks to a month a year that it is cold enough.
I don't hunt, but I do can beef in stews as well as rabbit by its self. It makes for a quick and easy meal that way. I am really bad about forgetting to take something out of the freezer. Plus, we are going off grid next year and won't be able to keep the freezer at all.

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I also like the convenience of home canned meats. It is very economical to buy 20 lbs. of chicken leg/thigh quarters, cook, remove skin & bones, cut into chunks and can. The bones & skin can be boiled while you're processing the chicken into jars and be canned for broth which can either be poured over the chicken before processing or processed separately. Imagine real chicken broth without any salt available whenever you need it. I've canned pork loin without cooking it first which is safe but it looks terrible in the jars. In fact, old beans work in canning nicely as they don't get mushy.

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Ditto what everyone else has said about the goodness, quality and convenience of home-canned meats.

My very first pressure canning project was chicken. Now I have a variety of home-canned goodies, including bean soup made with leftover ham, beef stew, beef chunks that can be made into stew, soups or stroganoff, chili, turkey and broth, chicken and broth and ground beef.

It is just DH and I so I can soups and poultry/broth in quarts and straight meet, like the beef chunks and ground beef is in pints.

Nothing like homemade chicken soup when you are sick, or stew and dumplings on a cold wet night, and all the prep was already done!

Quite awhile ago I bought some canned Bacon. It was folded with a sheet of paper, for ease of laying out, then you just fry it. Does anyone know of this and can it be done-homemade?

i can remember canned bacon and also hot dogs. this was in the 50's, the hot dogs had some kind of a bag of stuff in the center of the can if i remember right. my mom refused to buy them, so they were probably made from some kind of awful by-product. i just googled canned hot dogs and i see where some were recalled, so they may still be out there somewhere. i remember the canned bacon with the paper in it too. i would think natural casing hot dogs could be canned.

I am canning deer meat right now and from the looks of things I will be at it all day and probably after church tomorrow also.

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Isn't that the truth!!! I can stew sized pieces of venison, beef, and chicken. I have also started canning stock I make from bones and stuff.

I think the reason the venison is so awesome is because I brine it for about an hour or so before it's canned. Whatever I make with it has been consistantly good.

I just made some chicken mushroom soup yesterday with my canned dark meat chicken, canned chicken stock, and some egg noodles, it was awesome as well!

In some ways it's easier to can than freeze. I just put the raw chunks in the jar and process the appropriate amount of time, It's pretty easy.

I also can dry beans. Yes dry beans. I soak them, then can them with ham pieces and ham stock. I do this mainly for convieninece. Some beans get too mushy during the process, so I don't can those ones.

It's nice to have stuff already cooked and ready to go. Also, it takes just as much energy to cook a meal, as it does to can 14 or more meals. Then as someone else mentioned, it's nice for if there is an electricity or freezer problem, you don't lose all your meat.

I don't can jam or vegies, all I can is meat and stuff. It makes it good!

I've canned bacon - just cook it about 3/4 then pack it into jars and pour the grease over it. I don't use paper or even fold it nicely, just stuff it in. Pressure can it for 60 mins (pints) at 10 pounds. When you're ready to use it, just dump the whole thing in the frying pan and finish frying. Works great! I also canned some small breakfast sausages (the finger shaped ones in casings) the same way. Cook all the way, then pour the grease over the top and pressure can.

I've also bought some of the canned bacon from beprepared.com and it's a good deal because it doesn't have to be refrigerated and lasts for years on a shelf. About 50 slices per can for $12.95.

Oggie,
This was you, wasn't it?

Darwin says, "Darwin warns, "This is an Urban Legend. I cannot find an original soure, nor any confirmation. Although Snopes has not yet addressed its veracity (as of 2/2008) its widespread presence on the Internet and its overall tone lead me to consider it to be invented. Please contact me if you have information!"

Names have been removed to protect the stupid!

I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, sweet feed it on corn for a few weeks, then butcher it and eat it. Yum! Corn-fed venison. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer.

Since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not have much fear of me (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck four feet away) it should not be difficult to rope one, toss a bag over its head to calm it down, then hog-tie it and transport it home.

I filled the cattle feeder and hid behind it with my rope. The cattle, having seen a roping or two before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it.

After 20 minutes, my deer showed up, 3 of them. I picked a likely looking one, stepped out, and threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell she was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation.

I took a step toward it. It took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope, and received an education. The first thing I learned is that, while a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, it is spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope.

That deer EXPLODED.

The second thing I learned is that, pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range, I could fight down with some dignity. A deer? No chance.

That thing ran and bucked, it twisted and pulled. There was no controlling that deer, and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer firmly attached to a rope was not such a good idea. The only upside is that they do not have much stamina.

A brief ten minutes later it was tired, and not as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head.

At that point, I had lost my appetite for corn-fed venison. I hated the thing, and would hazard a guess that the feeling was mutual. I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope. But if I let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painful somewhere.

Despite the gash in my head, and several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer's pell-mell flight by bracing my head against large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to recognize that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in. I didn't want the deer to suffer a slow death.

I managed to get it lined up between my truck and the feeder, a little trap I had set beforehand, like a squeeze chute. I backed it in there, and I started moving forward to get my rope back.

Did you know that deer bite? They do!

I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite, so I was very surprised when I reached up there to grab hold of that rope, and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like a horse, it does not just bite and let go. A deer bites and shakes its head, like a pit bull. They bite HARD and won't let go. It hurts!

The proper reaction when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and wrenching away. My method was ineffective. It felt like that deer bit and shook me for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds.





I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now) tricked it. While I kept it busy tearing the bejesus out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose. That was when I learned my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up and strike at head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp. I learned long ago that when a horse strikes at you with its hooves and you can't get away, the best thing to do is make a loud noise and move aggressively towards the animal. This will cause it to back down a bit, so you can make your escape.

This was not a horse. This was a deer. Obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy. I screamed like a woman and turned to run.

The reason we have been taught NOT to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. Deer are not so different from horses after all, other than being twice as strong and three times as evil. The second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down.

When a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately depart. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What it does instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you, while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head.

I finally managed to crawl under the truck, and the deer went away. Now I know why people go deer hunting with a rifle and a scope. It's so they can be somewhat equal to the prey.