Canning Meat (Super Easy Raw Pack)

[Music] everybody this is your line from homesteading family and today I'm going to show you how simple it is to can meet just plain meat I think you'll be surprised at how easy it is now you're gonna need a pressure canner to do this so make sure you have a pressure canner and you've read the directions because every pressure canner is a little bit different now I'm gonna show you how to do it on the pressure canner that I have but this is really simple now I am starting with quart size jars and the wide mouth is really the easiest for something like meat it's just easier to pack in there well but there's no reason you can't use the regular mouth size so the first thing I do whenever I'm doing a canning project is to go ahead and get all of my jars washed and ready to go I want to make sure they're all clean they don't have anything left on them from the last use that they had and they're ready to go then I start to prepare my food and get my water heating so I have my tea kettle heated down at a boil it is hot and ready to go and I also have my canner filled with a little bit of water and heating up out on my canning set up and I'm gonna take you out there in a few minutes and show you all of those steps out there um then I make sure that I have all of my equipment laid out I have got my my canning funnel I've got my lids and my rings and I have any ingredients out that I need including a nice clean rag or two and then we're ready to get started now this is venison right here Josh went out hunting this morning and brought us back a nice venison and you know we already have hundreds of pounds of meat in the freezers and so I really like diversifying my meat storage having some dried some frozen some in brine and some on the shelf in jars and you know in jars is just such a great way to have them nicely can't because they're so quick and easy to just heat up and go for whatever meal you need it's really the convenience food of the homestead so this is so simple I just have this nice roast cut up into chunks that are you know I don't know about an inch square most directions very roughly this is not any by means perfect they're just kind of roughly chopped we cut it right off the bone and I try to make sure there's not too much connective tissue there's a little bit of fat a little bit on here but not too much because you don't want to bite into chewy bits every time now this is venison but you could use any red meat and do this the exact same way you could use beef lamb elk moose whatever it is that you have that you need to preserve that's red meat this is a great way to go and you're gonna be surprised this is so simple all I'm gonna do is take my very nice clean jar here and I have very clean hands and pack this right on into this jar now you don't really want to pack this in very tightly because you want to make sure that the liquid can flow around it nicely and just go ahead and fill that right up you're gonna want to leave about an inch of head space there my guide is usually right at this bottom ring of a jar and that just lets me know that I'm pretty close there now the great thing about raw packing meat like this cooking it from raw in the pressure canner is that it creates a lot of its own broth so I tend to only put a very little bit of hot water in here some people don't put any in but you really don't want to put you don't want to fill it all the way up with additional liquid because this is going to create enough liquid by itself so you can imagine how easy this would be just to open it and pour it into a pot and then you know put some carrots and onions or whatever else you want right into that pot and you're good to go for it just makes such a simple convenience food not to mention you're not using all that freezer space which you know sometimes we can just pack out those freezers and it's nice to know that you have your meat stored in different ways all right now this just happened to work out pretty nicely here on the amount but you know I just do however much I have meat wise to store so you can do as much as you'd like as little as you like you can also can this in pint sized jars and that would work out just fine for our family we really need the quart size now I'm gonna take about a teaspoon of salt for each jar and just put that right over the top this is not for safety of any sort so if you would like to leave the salt out feel free to do so this is just for flavoring so if you're on a low salt diet that's absolutely fine all right now like I said we're just gonna put a little bit in here this heats up the jar nicely if you just put a little bit of water in and just gives it a little bit of buffer in case you just don't get quite as much juice out of your meat as you were hoping and again I'm really just filling it I'm just gonna fill it up what's that about two inches maybe okay now I'm gonna take a very clean rag and I'm going to dip it into just a little bit of clean water and clean the rims of my jars off here and this is just to make sure that there's no food particles that are stuck on that rim that would cause a failure in the seal now I'm gonna go over to a dry part of this and just dry off those rims and just to be sure I usually run my finger over that jar to feel for any bits of salt that have hardened on there or anything like that any nicks in the jar because any of those things will cause a failure on your seal and you know that's not the end of the world but it's certainly nicer to just go ahead and have your jars seal the first time you can them so you don't have to do again no we're gonna put our brand-new lids right on there for pressure canning you really really need nice fresh lids on there and tighten them down finger tight with your being out and then we're ready to get these into the canner here we are at my outside canning station and this is just a camp stove that is able to hold the weight of this giant pressure canner now I love this pressure canner because it holds 19 quart jars at a time that means I can do a lot of food all at once which is really helpful when you want to be very efficient with not only your energy that your energy usage that you have to buy your propane but also your own energy which is really important we have a lot to do as homesteaders and a lot of food to cook and so we need to be able to do things in large enough batches to really make it worth it so this is my answer to that all right so you can see that the pressure canner is nicely heated and while I'm putting the jars in I'm gonna turn the heat off I always do this and let it just drop down just a little bit on temperature so it's not quite such a shock to the jars okay now the next step is to go ahead and get your jars into the canner make sure you always have a rack on the bottom of your canner if your jars are sitting right against the very bottom they're likely to bounce and break so you want to make sure that they're up off the bottom alright get these all settled in here alright so now we're gonna go ahead and get our lid on the canner this particular canner has an arrow and a line to match up too so you know right where to line your lids and then you're gonna go ahead and just slide the lock right on over and snug it on down now each pressure canner is going to be a little bit different and so you need to make sure you read the directions on your pressure canner to make sure that you're doing it right for your canner in particular now when we start we want to make sure we do not have a cap or a weighted gauge or jiggler or anything on our vent over here and that's so that we can let the steam build up and go ahead and push all the air out because remember we're kind of creating a vacuum in here because we're sealing all that pressure so we want the steam to be able to build up and push out all that air so you don't want to start with your jiggler or your weight on there so we're gonna go ahead and get this locked down now and the best way to do this is do opposing sides and go ahead and tighten it slightly just get it a little bit tight right off and then we'll go back through and tighten them all the way down now I know we've all heard horror stories from great grandmas about pressure canning and blowing up kitchens and things like that but you know these modern pressure canners have so many safety features on them that that really is almost impossible to do you're gonna get a lot of warning before you have any major problem and it's got all sorts of safety valves that will blow and start pouring out all of the excess pressure in case you have a problem like that so you just don't need to be worried about blowing up your pressure canner it's just not gonna happen all right now we're gonna put our heat back on and bring that temperature up to a nice steam check this at that point about every five minutes until you get a nice steady stream of coming right out here out of the pressure release and once that stream builds up then we're gonna start a timer for about 10 minutes and then we can put the cap on and start building up pressure well we're losing light fast here in the North Idaho winter days that are so short but you can see that hopefully you can see that we actually have quite a bit of steam coming out of our steam vent right here so we're gonna start the timer for 10 minutes and let the steam evacuate for about 10 minutes here before we go ahead and put our weight on and for me I use a 15 pound weight because I'm up in elevation if you're at sea level you go ahead and just use 10 pounds on your weight now a lot of canners you actually just use the gauge for and you don't have a poundage on your weight you just go ahead and use a standard weight and then bring your temperature your pressure up to using your gauge I like to use the jiggler that way I can check the temperature audibly from inside the house or I can keep a window open so I can hear what my pressure canner is doing and I work at a 15-pound if you work at sea-level you will start with a ten-pound that's your average weight and you are going to go ahead and set this right on on after your ten minutes of steam evacuation and let your temperature come up if you are using your gauge you're just going to watch the dial and make sure that the temperature gets up to your poundage or slightly over if you are using your weighted gauge you want to get up to where you're hearing your gauge jiggle a few times a minute several times a minute so if you're hearing kind of a - Chuck Chuck Chuck you're just fine on the gauge you don't want it to be like a stressed-out jiggle where it's jiggling really fast that means your pressure is getting a little too high when you go to adjust your pressure you'll want to adjust it very very slightly and slowly and you'll want to keep a really close eye on it until you get it stabilized where that pressure just isn't moving make sure you can either hear your jiggler all the pressure all the time that you're canning or you stay close by and check your pressure regularly that way you can correct before you have a problem if your pressure drops below your target pressure at any point you're supposed to start your canning process all over again that's why you really want to stay close and make sure you catch that before there's any sort of a problem now meat products need a full 90 minutes at their full pressure so we're gonna let that pressure build right on up to the to the correct poundage for your elevation and then we're gonna start the timer for 90 minutes and we're gonna let that go the whole 90 minutes making sure we keep our pressure pretty steady right in our target zone then after that 90 minutes is done we are going to go ahead and turn the heat off on our pressure canner and leave it alone you want that pressure to drop back down completely naturally don't sit there and hit the way to make it drop faster don't remove the weight what that will do is change that pressure too quickly and it will crack your jars or it will force food out of your jars which will cause it not to seal properly after that has come all the way down to the correct / to zero - no pressure at all then you can remove your weight at that point wait for ten more minutes and then you can open your jars get them out of the canner and set them somewhere in a draught free location to cool now I take my jars back inside because I certainly don't want to set them out here in the freezing temperature I take it outside and I let it go ahead and sit there to cool completely down for between 16 to 24 hours at which point I can take the Rings off clean up the jars if there's anything on them label them and put them on the shelves take care of you guys and enjoy your own homemade convenience food goodbye [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 2,412,401

Keywords: homestead, homesteading, homesteading family, canning, can meat, jars, bottling meat, venison, beef, elk, lamb, pressure can, raw pack meat, convienience food, canning meat, home canning meat, canning beef, canning venison, how to can meat

Id: 90bhL8B0ha8

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2017