How to raw pack chicken breast for canning from start to finish tutorial

hello welcome back to my kitchen i recently made a video talking about food storage why you need it what to think about all kinds of questions and one of the things in my food storage that's really really important is canning meats i have limited freezer space because we live off grid every freezer uses a lot of power we do have two along with the refrigerator but they still use a lot of power so when i find a good deal on meats or if i think that it's the good quality for whatever reason and i want to stock up there's only so much i can put in my freezers so that's when you get out your canner and your jars and you start jarring it up so i went yesterday and picked these up these are boneless skinless chicken breasts it's not the cheapest i've seen but they look good and they're good quality so i picked up two packages of these and i have a few others that were frozen so i've got right around nine to ten pounds probably closer to nine pounds so i am going to raw pack this today i i have done hot pack and broth and i love that especially with boneless skinless chicken thighs is my favorite way to cam notes but i do like to always have on hand boneless skinless chicken breasts that have been canned and i like the raw pack because there's so many meals that i can put together out of other jars out of my pantry opening up a can of chicken some people call it ugly chicken i don't to me it's just raw packed chicken and that it's different from my jars that have broth in them and the chicken thighs that have a firmer texture this tends to shred more which is very useful in some things so today we're going to can up chicken breasts start with clean tools you always want to start with clean tools and i have already washed my jars and we are not going to heat those today because we're raw pack and raw pack means it's going to start out cold so your water in your canner starts out cold and it's a pressure canner you must pressure can chicken and your jars are cold you start out with everything very clean and i'm just going to cut this in chunks i'm not really particular because like i said it goes in the jars chunks but it comes out sort of in chunks but it shreds very very easy so that's usually how i'm going to do it so about that big and this actually doesn't take very long if you have boneless skinless chicken breasts if you have to remove skin and bone and fat if you remove fat i always sleep a little bit it doesn't bother me if you have to do all that it's going to take you a little bit longer and it's not bad cutting them up totally thawed but i almost prefer cutting them when they're just slightly frozen because they cut very easily just wanted to show you the difference these were all raw and defrosted this chicken breast i took out the freezer and it's huge i mean what am i going to use it for other than cutting it up for something so it is just slightly frozen it gives but it's not all the way and i'm going to show you how easy the knife goes through so if you are able to do that it actually saves you a little bit of effort because the knife glides through it easier so i got my very clean jars again they are not hot we don't want that right now i'm using wide mouth pints you can also put this in quartz i highly highly highly recommend wide mouth whichever you use and you'll see why very soon put your canning funnel on your jar because this does get messy and although there will be some things getting on the rim as we go through this keep as much off as possible and now you just start to fill the jars now you're gonna get about one pound to one pint jar no bandit you're not getting any of this i know i said you're gonna but you're not gonna so just forget about it and the object of this is to fill all of these gaps so you are going to have to get your hands dirty and i usually do this as i go because i think it's easier and does a better job so i will de-bubble it before i do anything because i want to press this meat down there really really well and my experience is if you really pack the meat in there well you're gonna get really close to one pound it's not always exact but it's pretty close especially when you're starting out with boneless skinless because you're not having to cut much away and i cut almost nothing just a few little red pieces that i didn't like nothing wrong with them i just didn't like them and when you think you have the jar full you can still add more to it you're going to have one inch of headspace which basically means you want it to be to this ring this bottom ring right here so that one's a little big i need a smaller piece do and there we go that's really close to one pound of meat and i see another bubble so i'm gonna go take care of that and you also want to de-bubble because you don't want any air pockets now if you don't have one of these nifty little de-bubbling tools you can use a plastic or wooden utensil you know the the handle of a wooden spoon works pretty well if you have plastic ones like that you don't want to use metal when you're doing this on your canning jars and even though this is thin it really does pretty well because it gets down in those little spaces and you can maneuver things so as i said before i started cutting this up i had a little over nine pounds and i have nine pint jars filled so see this little half pint i'm gonna do this and that may look silly but you know what that's half a pound of meat it fills it and that's a serving it's not quite so i may take just a touch from some of these other jars so by just cutting little bits off of some of these jars the jars are still pretty full and i got a full half pint you try and keep things off the rim but as you can see you're going to get things on the rim of these jars so i start out just with just very slightly damp paper towel and i wipe them down i'm not cleaning at this point i'm just getting any loose meat or grease that's on there and we'll follow up and make sure they're thoroughly clean because you have to make sure there is absolutely nothing on that rim to keep the jar from sealing now what i'm going to do is i have some white vinegar in a bowl and i'm going to use that to wipe the rims and i'm going to do this two times so i'll go through and wipe all of them and then go back with another clean paper towel and wipe them again start with a new cloth so there we go i've got my nine pints and one half pint and i'm not going to throw out this vinegar that's left over you could add this to your canner and i already have added some along with the three inches of water that my all-american canner requires but i will save this and tomorrow after my jars have totally cooled i will clean them with vinegar added with a little water and so it doesn't get wasted and i make sure my jars are completely clean i have my lids heated up and i have this nifty little rack that i've never used yet so i'm using it today that's better finger tight i am not putting any pressure on the jar but it's on well enough you don't want to crank it down and some of you know all this but i have recently found that a number of people have not really done a lot of this so i'm going to try and be thorough today so finger tight and matte jars ready now if you're using the new shirt type lids if that's what you have from ball or kerr it says not to do this but in my experience i even heat those up they do better than if i don't i just have better luck doing this don't boil them i just heat this to soften that sealant so again putting these into my cool pressure canner i have the all-american it says to put three inches of water in the bottom and use a bottom rack so i'm going to put these in there right now so that's what it looks like for those of you are new that's how it looks in the canner i have my all-american with the three inches of water before i put these in and then i put a rack on the bottom and i've got seven pints on the bottom layer now because this i have more than that and this is a large enough canner this is the 921 all-american and i can add more pints on top of this but be sure and use the rack because you don't want the other jars sitting directly on top of the seals put my two other pints in here on the top rack and my half pint brian asked me to can two half pints of glycerin that he uses somehow in his beer making i don't know so i'm going to add them in there if you have other things you can can you can can jars of water for emergency purposes sterile water you could can beans in with this whatever it is needs to be able to take the full amount of time and because this is meat and i'm canning pints and half pints you can the same as pints i am going to pressure can them for 75 minutes at full pressure so that is one of the reasons you have to make sure there's plenty of water because that's a pretty long processing time now if you're going to do quartz it needs to be 90 minutes at full pressure and i'll explain that a little bit more now again for the people that are new and even people that have been canning for a while there's this nifty app that you can get on your phone called canning timer and checklist and this basically walks you through the entire canning process so if you just need a refresher or if you are starting out for the first time i highly recommend this i showed my sister how to use this when i taught her to pressure can and she absolutely loves it you go in and you decide are you canning vegetable fruit meat seafood or pickles and i am canning meat so it comes up to the next chicken or rabbit with buns chicken or rabbit without bones stock broth red meat and it goes down the list i'm doing chicken without bones and pints or quartz i'm using pints what kind of pack it's hot or raw and again this is raw and how are you canning dial gauge is generally presto and mirror you can get weighted gauge for those i believe i'm not really sure but all-american is a weighted gauge which means you're going to put this little weight on there for your altitude so i'm going to use weighted gauge then you choose your elevation well i'm at 5200 feet so i'm between 4 000 and 6 000 feet and now it's going to show me that make sure that all my choices are correct and i hope y'all can see this continue prepare your jars lids and rings and you have to go through and check things off two to three inches of water in the canner prepare the food fill the jars bubble and wipe the rim adjust the lids and rings place the jars in the canner now i have to fasten the lid securely on the canner so let's do that so for the all-american you have a little arrow right here on the lid and you have a notch on the canner and you need to line those two up when it closes so you'll start with it a little to the right and then you'll turn it until they line up sometimes it's a little bit stubborn and then what you want to do is take opposite sides now if you're using a presto it's going to be different this does not have a gasket the presto and mirror use gaskets and they do not have the same kind of seal where you do this opposite sides and what you want to do before you tighten it you want to look and make sure that it's pretty even i'm a little bit off here so i'm going to loosen that tighten that side a little bit more and this is to make sure that you have a good seal because when you're putting all this pressure in here you want to make sure you've got a good seal [Music] i'm not putting them on really tight right now this step is almost just kind of like leveling but now you go back opposite sides and really turn them [Music] all right i'm confident that my lid is on securely and i'm going to turn this on again it's totally cold right now and so are the contents i'm going to put it on about a medium heat on my stove now medium on mine maybe medium high on yours you don't want to shock the contents so i usually start out around medium you'll start seeing steam come through this little vent that's what you want to see so we're going to bring this up slowly to heat it up and we're going to wait to see that steam and at that point when it's a full steam column coming up and it's steady and it's not just sputters you want a full steam here at that time we're going to set our timer for 10 minutes which brings us back to our canning app so we have fastened the lid securely on the canner and this says turn the heat to high again mine is different yours will probably be set for high and then you say next so what happens now is once there's that steady stream of steam you want that to flow for 10 minutes leave the pressure the heat where it's at you want that to evacuate the air and create the pressure but this even gives you a timer we're not going to start it yet we're just going to let this come up to temperature start to steam and then we will turn on the timer and i'll bring you back all right it's taken a while to get up to temperature and i'm not sure if you can see light just isn't that great but you can see the steam there that's what you want to see and now we start the timer so 10 minutes and leave your temperature where it is all right my timer went off so i hit next and it says step 3 build pressure place the weight or closed petcock and let pressure build 15 psi now mine has a weight so i'm going to put that on now and because i need 15 pounds of pressure i'm going to put the weight on so that it's on the 15. and although there's a little bit of pressure built up we have to wait until it gets to about 15 and on this gauge it's going to read about 13 and a half is usually what it is if i'm using my gauge canners also but i have my 15 pound weight on there and i'm just gonna let this build up pressure until this starts to rock just about once or twice every minute so we'll come back okay it's come up to pressure and again that's a 15 pound weight but on my gauge and it seems to match what happens on my gauge pressure counter right around 13 to 13 and a half pounds of pressure but we've got this rocking quite a bit right now so what we need to do is reduce the temperature and this is going to take just some time and patience to find out exactly where your burner needs to be to keep it at the right pressure we don't want this rocking continuously so i need to play with the temperature i know about where it goes but i need to play with the temperature until i get that to rocking one time maybe two every minute so i'll be working on that and then we'll come back in a while this has to can now 75 minutes at this pressure do not let it go below that pressure or you have to start the timer all over again so stay close keep close eye on it and make sure that you are keeping it up to pressure so i let this process at 15 pounds of pressure for 75 minutes 1 hour and 15 minutes and that was on my timer for the canning app so at that point as soon as the timer went off i turned the burner off and i have let this sit and there's my dog but we are now down to zero pounds of pressure and we're gonna check that again for those of you that are familiar with canning you probably already know this but it's it's for these people that have not done canning before and need help so there's a slight hiss but it's pretty much gone so i'm gonna take the weight off i'm gonna wait five minutes i know it's hard but believe me it's worth it in the long run so i took the weight off i'm gonna put my timer on for five minutes i have let this sit for five minutes and these are warm but not real hot now i'm going to loosen the lugs on this i'm going to remove the lid away from me always always always remove the lid so that any steam will go out away from you now i'm gonna wait five minutes so we're gonna put the timer back on i've let this sit for another five minutes so it's pretty much a total of 10 minutes time sitting and this is what it looks like and it is still boiling in the jar so be very very very very careful i'm going to remove these to a cloth on my countertop because you do not want to set this directly on a cold countertop and try and place the jars and probably about two inches away from each other they need room for air to circulate now use i like to use the handle of some kind of flatware it works pretty well just to lift that out of the way and now we have all of our jars of chicken that were in the first layer i want to show you i just took all the jars out of the canner and that water is mostly clear there's a little bit of haze on it but mostly it's clear water which means the jars did not evacuate and cause any siphoning which would show uh colored liquid it would show grease but you know what it's mostly clear and the way you can avoid that is waiting patiently for that five minutes and then that five minutes so here are my jars and i know you can see they are actively boiling the glycerin not really but they're fine but all of these jars of chicken are just boiling like crazy and that's okay so at this point leave them alone don't touch them for at least 12 hours and preferably 24 hours don't poke the tops to see if they sucked in don't do anything just let them sit in a draft free spot on your countertop with a towel underneath it to protect from shock and just wait for the magic to happen don't touch them i know it's tempting believe me i know it's tempting but you don't want to cause a false seal so leave them alone let them come down totally over 24 hours and then if you check them and there is no pop when you touch them again after 24 hours then that's a good sign i will come back and show you what i do tomorrow tomorrow night this video is a little bit long but i really wanted to go into details for the people that did not know all of the steps now this is the leftover vinegar from yesterday i'm going to add just a touch of water and that that lid came off very easily this is how i check to make sure for a good seal i've taken off the ring after 24 hours and i lift by the very edges of the metal lid i do not try and touch the glass at all and i lift it up [Music] now this is not a full guarantee just because sometimes and it doesn't happen very often in fact very seldom but once in a while you will get a false seal and it will still lift up like this and after days months whatever you will have the seal fail so what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna just clean the jars and this is a mixture of vinegar and water and mostly this is to get any residue off any spots of grease or anything like that that would cause critters to be attracted to your jars now you saw that these the water was pretty clear after these were finished [Music] but i will still do it you know what dogs cats and all kinds of animals have really strong sense of smell and if they smell the meat they're going to try and get to it so this is just an extra step that to me is totally worth it and you just want to clean it now you can clean this with soap and water too however when it's meat i will usually do that and then clean it again with vinegar if i think that there's any chance if my water is not quite that clear i would probably do soap and water first and then this step but because i saw pretty much nothing in these jars in the water so i am going to just clean this way and i have to tell you i'm being distracted because i just went and picked up some peeps some baby chickens today and they are just in there peeping away letting me know that either things are good or bad i'm not sure but they just ate finally so hopefully it's all good so here's what you get this was one pound of meat and it has shrunken a little bit it's kind of shrunken in and down just a little and there's broth with just a little bit of fat in there which is not a bad thing in my book so that is ready to go on the shelf i will not put the rings back on some people do if i were to do it at all it would be very loosely as in you could feel it give and that's only if i were going to stack a piece of cardboard and then another set of jars on top of it i don't do that the reason i don't do that is if there's a false seal i want the lid to pop i want to know it because i don't want to take take any chances on the product going bad and me not knowing it it's just one of the ways that i safeguard my family so i've cleaned it and i can lift it if i without the rings lift it by the lid only i normally will put these on a shelf by themselves or i will put them in a canning jar box and then store them in my pantry these never last long because we use them all the time this makes absolutely wonderful shredded chicken for mexican tacos if or if you want to make barbecue sauce with it whatever you want to do this is open this jar open something else pour them together heat them up and you have supper ready in minutes it's not the prettiest and but i will tell you i mean a lot of people complain about how ugly the inside of the jars are when you make this you can see there is a little bit of residue on the inside but mostly the meat has shrunken and is all in one piece or it appears to be it's really not that bad but it tastes wonderful i've also heard people say it tastes like tuna i don't think it does i think it tastes like chicken so you have to decide for yourself i will say this is one of those things i want on the shelf all the time if i want to make a quick supper i can do so many things with what's in this jar this is one meal you can't beat that and while we're on the subject of canning a while back and several times i have shown you this and i want to do an update i got a whole lot i mean a whole lot of boxes of these very very very old curved canning lids 43 cents that's been a while right these let's see the brassy color and then on the back side they are kind of a gray sealant but it's they're very heavy and there is a lot of sealant on these but because they were so old and they had been stored i don't know how and for how long a long time i decided i have to wipe the dust off because it's been sitting a while i decided to test it so this was jarred up on september 19th of 2020 today is may 7th so this has been about eight months in the jar i have just left it sitting on my countertop mostly so i don't forget about it because i have a lot going on and i will forget about things so i just want you to see i am lifting this solely by the metal and this is a this is some water but this still has a really solid seal after eight months and this is one of these very very very old lids now if you get your hands on them i just recommend you do the same thing run a test there's nothing worse than jarring up your food and putting your time and money into it only to have the lid fail which is why i am testing this so if you get your hands on it this is what i recommend run a test use one jar up some water pressure can water bath whatever you're going to do and see if it's going to hold up at this point i don't think i have any concerns about using this for my food if i do i will come back and let you know but i think this will be my last update on this this simple jar of bottled water and i am confident that the seals are going to hold at least as well as these may be better as i said this sealant was so wide and so thick and it didn't dry out it didn't deteriorate it's holding a really good seal so i hope that gives someone some help some ideas and if you've never can pressure canned especially meats don't be afraid follow the steps cleanliness process use the canning app it works get yourself some jars of meat on your shelf you're going to love them i'm going to try and show more videos of how to use these but sometimes it's just grabbing different jars off my shelf throwing them together and they come out wonderful so if you have not watched my channel before please go down below and hit the subscribe bell hit the notification bell because if you don't choose that and if you don't allow notifications on your device you won't know when i upload a video and i never know what i'm going to upload because it's life and it's what i come up with so thank you for watching god bless and we'll talk soon you

Channel: Vickie's Country Home

Views: 18,784

Keywords: Vickie’s Country Home, Off Grid, Canning, Recipe, Tutorial, How to, Can chicken, Ugly chicken, Faith, Preparedness, Prepping, Storing food, Home Canned meats, Sustainability, Modern homestead, Nevada homestead, Desert homestead

Id: Rpsf6hrtKF8

Length: 42min 49sec (2569 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021