I'm CANNING our TURKEY!

hi everybody Welcome Back To Living Traditions Homestead my name is Sarah well this past Thanksgiving I went a little bit overboard in the turkey department and I ordered a 25 pound turkey from our friends Ben and Andrea from VW Family Farm in Northern Arkansas they raised the most beautiful non-GMO turkeys this past year and we decided that we were gonna buy one from them 25 pound turkey sounded amazing I thought it out I cooked it up I brought it out of the the oven and it was gigantic we ate tons of it on Thanksgiving Day we have lots of leftovers and you guys I still have a ton of turkey left so I decided rather than doing what I've done in the past years which is cut it up and put it in freezer bags and use it the rest of the year which inevitably I forget about some of them and then they get freezer burn and they don't taste very good and ends up wasting way tasted this year I decided to go ahead and can the cooked turkey meat and bring you guys along with that process now if you don't have turkey left over that's fine because this process is going to work for any cooked meat that you have left over from a big party or if you just had like a big roast that not everybody ate all of say for instance you have a lot of meat in the freezer that's getting freezer burned and you want to cook it up and preserve it before it goes bad in the freezer you can cook up a bunch of roasts a bunch of chickens a big turkey or whatever and do this process it's all the same you guys and it's so easy and a lot of us who raise our own food on our Farms or homesteads we're so busy in the summer preserving what's coming out of the garden that we often don't have time to worry about the meat that we might have that's getting freezer burned or just if we have an abundance of meat in the freezer that we want to get out of there and clear up new new room this is an amazing thing to do in the winter time when we're not so busy in the gardens so I'm so glad that you're gonna stick around while I can some of our leftover Thanksgiving turkey let's go ahead and open this up and see what we have to work with basically we have eaten like this entire half of this turkey but most of this half of the turkey is still in there we need to take all the meat off of this gorgeous turkey pick off anything that's still on the bones that we haven't gotten off previous days and we're going to just get that prepared for canning now I will say that I am not wasting these precious bones here because I'm gonna be making turkey bone broth later on at another time uh and so I'm gonna keep these just in a separate container here for me to get ready to make bone broth first things first is to cut any of this meat that's still on these bones and save it for the canning process I'm also going to be saving this gorgeous skin for the broth making process because it adds amazing flavor [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] well that part of the process is all done so I have this amount of meat I'm going to be dicing up and starting to put in jars and then here is the carcass that's left over and these are the all the bones and skin and kind of like the fatty or flabby parts that I I picked off and that will be incorporated into the broth that I'm going to make so now we can set this aside and we can start working on dicing up this turkey now I'm going to be using pint-sized regular Mouth Jars because this is a really good size or quantity of meat for me to throw into a soup or a casserole or to make chicken salad something like that and these are this is fantastic I have canned meat in quart sized jars and it's fine it works great it's wonderful but sometimes it's just too much meat for us in a meal a lot of times my kids will like to make chicken salad and then they only use half of a jar half of a quart size jar and then the rest of it ends up in the refrigerator and sometimes it gets missed and I just hate for food to go bad in the refrigerator before we can use it all so this time I am using pint size jars I'm also using the regular Mouth Jars because the lids are cheaper and I can actually fit more jars into to a canner if they're the smaller regular Mouth Jars that's just why I do it everybody has their own way of doing things so we're just going to get these set up and start dicing up this meat and putting it into our jars important when you're canning any type of meat and whether it's already cooked or if it's raw is to make sure that you're not putting many of the fatty bits into the jar fat kind of comes to the top of the jar and if it boils over it all inside your jar during the canning process it can compromise the seal and make it not seal or it could allow an opportunity for bacteria to get in there and spoil your meat that's in there so it's important that when you're cutting the meat and going through the meat for canning it doesn't have much of the fatty bits in there good foreign [Music] I'm going to press down the meat a little bit but not super tight and we're going for about an inch to an inch and a quarter of space from the top of the meat to the top of the jar [Music] foreign well that's all done I ended up getting um two four six eight jars worth of the diced turkey I do have just a tiny little bit left over that I'm just gonna put in a container glass container in the refrigerator that's enough for like a sandwich or a snack or something like that and so now we can get on to the process of canning it one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that we're going to be using a pressure canner so when you are canning meat you absolutely have to use the pressure canning canning method because what's inside of the jars is not acidic whatsoever so we'll be using one of my pressure canners and it's actually probably the most affordable small pressure canner that's out there it's very versatile and is really nice for these kind of smaller batches of canning when canning the cooked meat we need to add some liquid to these jars you can't just can them like this so we have a choice we can either back fill with boiling water or with broth if I had been thinking about this and planting better I probably could have used all of those bones that I saved to make a broth ahead of time so that I'd be back filling with some really amazing turkey broth but I didn't plan that well and I don't have any just like spare turkey broth or chicken broth to go in here so I am going to be using water so I do need to get some water into my pot here we'll put it on the stove and get it boiling besides the water the only other thing I'm going to be adding to each of these jars is a half a teaspoon of salt and I am using pink Himalayan salt now salt is an option it doesn't it's not required it doesn't help with like the canning process or anything it just adds some nice I don't know brings out the flavor of the chicken it makes it more easily usable right out of the can without much seasoning and I really enjoy it so we're just going to put a half of a teaspoon of salt in each one of these I do buy my salt in bulk I think I buy it in five or ten pound bags from Azure standard and I really enjoy being able to buy salt and a lot of other things in bulk from them they're a great company they deliver to lots of neighborhoods across the country if you'd like to know more about them you can visit them at azurestandard.com you can also find the link to them in the description of this video know they're a really great company while my water is warming up I just want to show you the pressure canner that I'm going to be using today this is a really basic Presto pressure canner it just uses a weight it doesn't have a dial it just has a weight that you put on top when it's the appropriate time this pressure canner will hold 10 pint-sized jars the regular mouth pints size jars or seven quart jars and this really what this was my first pressure canner it has served me really well I like to use it still for small batches I have a couple others that are quite a bit bigger that will allow me to do two rows of pint-sized jars and I have a different one All-American canner that will allow me to do two rows of quartz size jars but in this situation where I don't have a whole lot to can I really do still just like this canner I have this listed in our Amazon shop if you want to take a look at it like I said this is probably one of the least expensive the most basic really the easiest to use kind of pressure canner that's out there it's really good for beginners okay while the water is also heating up I do need to put water inside my pressure canner in the Presto canners they have a water level Mark however you always want to hold on to your instruction manual for all of your pressure canners because it will tell you well it gives you the instructions that you can refer back to but it'll also give you the exact quantity of water that you should put in there I think the mark in this canner is about two quarts also in this pressure canner and actually really with all pressure canners in the bottom it comes with kind of one of these shelves that keeps your jars up off the bottom and it has these holes in there that allow the Steam and the water through it that's really important to make sure that you have one looks like our water is almost ready to put into our jar so let's fill this with some water and get to canning our water is ready so we can get canning all right so what we're gonna do is we are gonna backfill this hot water into our jars until the water is just about one inch from the top or a little bit farther away that looks about right but I'm gonna check it there are these measuring tools that you can get online on Amazon or whatever that helps you measure how far away the liquid is in your jar how big how much of headspace you have and so I'm checking to see that we have one inch of head space we have a little bit more than an inch of head space and that's actually perfect now what I'm going to do is use a chopstick or something like it to just poke down inside of there because we're releasing any of the trapped air bubbles down in there we don't want air bubbles trapped in there okay we're gonna re-measure it again after we do that just to make sure we're okay I just added a tiny little bit okay now the next step is to wipe the rim of your jar and this is really important especially when you're working with meat or broth or anything that might have kind of a greasy film that could have gotten on there remember I talked with you about how you want to make sure to take out off all the fat from your meat before you put it in there well sometimes a little bit might get on there and you need to wipe that off but in the case of something being oily you want a little bit more than just a wet rag with water you want a little bit of vinegar on there too so I brought out my white vinegar this cloth is already damp I'm just gonna put some white vinegar on there and then I'm going to use this cloth to wipe the rim of it because it will really cut the grease that could be on the rim of your jar okay and then we're going to put on a clean brand new lid now remember these days you don't need to heat or sterilize these if you don't want to just make sure that they're clean and put on a ring just like this finger tight and this can go right in your canner and wait for the rest of them [Music] we're just we're just going to repeat that with all the rest of the jars again we're going to fill up the jar until it's just about one inch from the top double check that headspace make sure we're close yes we are close use our Chopstick to get out any of the air bubbles I'm going to double check the level there oh we're right on now using our vinegar towel wipe the rim put on a new lid put on a ring and this can go in to your canner okay last jar to go in there I do have room in here for two more jars but I don't have two more jars of turkey so we're just processing eight today I'm going to put the top on my pressure canner and I'm going to turn on the heat to almost high probably more than medium high and we're gonna let this come up to temperature we're gonna know that it's up to temperature because steam is going to start coming out of this little hole right here we're gonna let the steam vent out of here for 10 minutes before we put our weight on but I'll make sure to come back and show you those steps of the process when we get there so right now we're just waiting for the canner to come up to temperature we're looking for steam to come out of this little hole now that there's steam coming out of the top we can set a timer for 10 minutes we're gonna let the steam continue flowing out there and then when the 10 minute Mark is up we'll put the weight on it well it's time to put our weight on and I wanted to explain to you a little bit about how this works here now like I said this scanner does not have a pressure dial that shows you what pressure your canner is up to generally in a pressure canner you will be canning at 10 pounds of pressure if you're at a higher elevation like we are we can at 15 pounds of pressure and this weights this gauge takes care of all of that for you now I just want to show you that this particular weight gauge is a three part weight gauge so this this single part here would be considered five pounds of pressure if you put one of these rings on here that is for 10 pounds of pressure but because of our altitude we are putting on the the second ring it's upside down that that makes it 15 pounds of pressure so that's what we're gonna put on the top of our pressure canner to tell us when it's up to the appropriate pressure now it's time it's been over 10 minutes so I'm going to put our pressure gauge on top up there and we are going to wait to set our processing time until this weight starts rocking back and forth now remember at the beginning of this I said I'm doing turkey but this is the same process for any type of cooked meat whether it be turkey chicken pork roast beef roast Venison and you will be processing your meat or I'll be processing my meat for 75 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes for Pine if you were processing quartz you would process for 90 minutes but that is not until this weight starts rocking back and forth so when we get to that point I will show you what that looks like well it's a little loud at the moment but I just wanted to show you what it looks like and sounds like when this starts rocking it just started so now is the time that we set our timer an hour and 15 minutes this is what we'll be sending hours at when our timer goes off we're just going to turn the heat off for a while when we get to that point I'll come back and then let you know the steps that you should be taking after this is finished processing foreign time is all finished we turn the heat off and everything now if you've been hearing chirping in the background it I don't think it's been really bad until just like right before I started talking we do have quail chicks in another room and they're peeping a little bit so sorry if you heard that through the entire video so what we're going to do now is we're just going to leave this alone we're just going to let it sit here for actually quite a while we're waiting for the pressure to come all the way down to zero and you'll know that because this dial right here will drop back down to its original spot that is when it's technically safe to open the top of your pressure canner what's recommended though is for you to wait at least 10 minutes after this drops and take off the weight after that you'll want to wait at least 10 minutes before taking off the lid I really like to wait quite a long time sometimes I wait over an hour or if I'm canning right before bed I'll just leave it with the top on it until the next morning this is the reason why if you remove the top too early now after all the pressure is gone and there's no danger of it being harmful for you if you remove the top too early and the change in temperature inside happens too quickly the contents of your jars and really mostly the liquid part can rush out or siphon out because of that temperature change and you really don't want that to happen because the food particles can get around the rim and compromise your seal so you really just want to wait until you're comfortable taking the lid off in my experience the longer you wait it's kind of better I don't like to to sacrifice all of the work that I've done and have the potential of the seal being compromised so I will let this settle down and cool down for quite a while before I open the lid but here again I direct you back to the instruction manual that comes with your pressure canner it will tell you the the minimum recommendations for how long to keep the lid on before opening it and removing your food items so guys I'm just gonna let these chill here for quite a while and maybe in a few hours I'll take them out and I'll be sure to show you how absolutely beautiful this canned meat is well it's been a couple hours it is safe to open the lid I'm just going to turn it and lift it up from the back first just in case there's any steam in there I don't get hurt or get a steam burn foreign the jars are still bubbling inside let's take them out and take a look [Music] well you guys I hope that you really did see how easy it is to can up extra meat from a big meal or if you were just trying to clean out your freezer and get some things canned as a more permanent way to preserve your food it really is easy and it is wonderful to have on hand you guys if you're enjoying our videos make sure that you hit the Subscribe button below and as always really the best way that you can help us here on the homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care God bless [Music]

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 125,894

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: Og8IOczfp5o

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021