gunDriller
4th September 2011, 09:26 AM
from a member named KPeavey - this is one of the better threads i've seen about canning meat -
"The logistics of high volume canning needs to be considered in your project. A whole bison will make a fine meal, but if you are going to process one into canning jars, it will take a while. One purpose of canning is to store food without additional energy. Even with 4 canners going all day every day, you will need refrigeration to store the bison while it waits to go into the canners.
1 canner load of meats will take 90 minutes, plus heat up and cool down time. Figure 3 hours to get a load through a canner. Even with help to cover the night shift, you can only get 8 loads, maybe 9, through a single canner in a day. A quart jar will hold 2 pounds of meat and broth, my canner will hold 7 quarts for a total of 14 pounds per load. There are canners of greater capacity, but they will of similar scale. You take a 1500# bison, it will dress to 1000# of meat. You will need to process 70-100 loads of meat alone. The time required being several days of 24/7 processing.
I've looked hard at canning as a means of storing food. I have 2 canners which really gives me a boost when I have time to do it. For the cost of the single use lid, maximizing calories is what I have concluded to be my best use. This does not mean you should do the same thing, your objective can be whatever you like, and the description you made of a complete package is one I may consider doing myself.
Your next consideration is consuming what you store. While the stuff will have a shelf life of several years, eventually you need to get through them all. 70 loads of 7 quarts of bison will give you a pound of bison for a meal every couple of days for years. Its tasty, but appetite fatigue will set in before too long, ans you'll still have hundreds of pounds to go through.
I've gone with diversification. Chicken, pot roast, meat balls, meat sauce, chunky meat sauce, chunks of pork, beef stew, chicken livers. Different meats have different properties. WARNING: DO NOT CAN HOT DOGS OR SMOKED HAM. Hot dogs turn into mush, the smoke in the ham ruins the meat as a result of the canning process.
The chicken is delicious: I buy a 10 pound sack of thighs and drumsticks, runs about 5 bucks. First I remove the skins and excess fat. I will render these to draw off the grease for cooking. Then the skins go into the oven to make crisps or are fed to the hens. The meat is washed and put on a good simmer. When fully cooked and cooled, I separate the meat, with the bones and cartilage going to the hens. Bones are later crushed with cinder blocks and added to the compost heap. The meat goes into jars along with the stock from the simmer pot. The remaining stock is reduced until it is dark and full of flavor, then run through a seive. I'll get 7 pounds of meat, a pint of grease, and a couple of quarts of rich stock ready to make gravy. All of this will fit in a single canner load. Anything that wont fit becomes dinner that night.
I find the chicken to be the best stuff. The flavor is intensified because it is dark meat and has been simmered with the bones. Upon opening the jars, the aroma will be STRONG. It may take a little bit of getting used to. This chicken meat is the most versatile ingredient in my pantry. Open the jar, eat it straight-I've taken it to work for lunch. Drain the stock (and save for later use), the meat makes a fine chicken salad sandwich. Use the stock when making rice, throw the meat into a casserole, use the entire jar in a soup/stew/pot pie. Looking at the numbers, a pint jar holds an easy 12 ounces of chicken, and costs about a buck. By comparison, a 5 oz of tuna is 79¢. In a crisis situation, the volume of meat in a pint jar mixed into some noodles or soup can offer 3-4 people a reasonable amount of protien for a day, with noticeable flavor, appealing texture, and a little bit of gravy to round things out.
I use pints and quarts. There is no quarantee that I will have refrigeration when I open up a jar. Living alone, I can use a pint of meat in a single meal. A quart will require refrigeration of leftovers.
Chicken livers are delicious with brown gravy and noodles. Toss an onion and some mushrooms in there, you got a tasty meal. I can grow the onions, probably the mushrooms if I had the time to get the project going. Chicken livers are dirt cheap, a pound mostly fits in a pint jar. I give them a rinse, fill the jars and process without further effort. Quick and easy.
For meat sauce I use a blend of ground beef, turkey and pork. Being that ground meats have such a high surface area and are readily exposed to bacteria during production, I cook ground meats fully before filling the jars. As an added degree of safety, I add tomato sauce to increase the acidity of the product. The sauce also serves to allow air bubbles to escape during jar filling. Beef and pork can be fatty while turkey is lean. By simmering the meat sauce beforehand I can remove much of the resulting grease. Ground turkey is about half the price of ground beef, so I can stretch my food bill along with my canning volume. This is just the meat. There is not enough tomato sauce to make a great dish, so I will add more sauce, tomato paste and all the flavorings at meal prep time. While nothing stops me from making a complete sauce before filling the jars, this method of storing just the meat allows flexibility when I open the jar: taco meat, pasta sauce, lasgana, chili, or I can give it a light rinse to make a stroganoff. Eating the meat right out of the jar will find it a bit bland using this method. After about 3 years, the texture of ground meat will tend towards chewy. Being small to begin with, there is not a whole lot of chewing needed.
Pork can be a fatty meat. I've taken entire pork shoulders, carved off the fat (save it in the freezer for the beans), diced the meat and processed in jars. Hot water is added to fill my jars. I find the particular cut of pork to come out a bit stringy after a couple of years. Still, I can open a jar, cook up some rice with the jar stock, add the pork, and end up with a meal that will fill me and let me do some hard work. While I have trimmed the fat, I still end up with a layer of grease on the top of the jar, anywhere from a quarter inch to an inch thick. Spoon it out, use it for cooking.
I dont add vegetables to these jars. They can become mushy real easy, throwing off the entire batch. I do my vegetables all by themselves. With an active garden, I can usually find something to add to the dish when I open the meat jar.
I dont add gravy to the jars. All to often commercial gravy mixes have ingredients that dont behave in a canning jar. They can ruin the meat. For beef stew, I add gravy and thicken it when I open the jar. Pay particular attention to smoked ingredients. The smoke flavor, in my experience, intensifies to such a degree during canning that the food is absolutely disgusting. I also do not add salt to the jars. I can add salt at the table.
I do not can beans. Those things will store just fine in a dry container. I'll cook them up when I need them.
When the garden is going well and I have some time on my hands, I put up a canner load, sometimes 2 in a week. All jars are labeled, dated, and rotated on the shelf. Its not a whole lot, but I only open up a couple of jars in a week. My food storage is growing slowly but steadily. If I get way ahead on something, say the chicken, I'll stop putting that up and increase my consumption by a jar a month until storage levels are in line with reasonability."
http://peakoil.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=62713&p=1076731#p1076731
"The logistics of high volume canning needs to be considered in your project. A whole bison will make a fine meal, but if you are going to process one into canning jars, it will take a while. One purpose of canning is to store food without additional energy. Even with 4 canners going all day every day, you will need refrigeration to store the bison while it waits to go into the canners.
1 canner load of meats will take 90 minutes, plus heat up and cool down time. Figure 3 hours to get a load through a canner. Even with help to cover the night shift, you can only get 8 loads, maybe 9, through a single canner in a day. A quart jar will hold 2 pounds of meat and broth, my canner will hold 7 quarts for a total of 14 pounds per load. There are canners of greater capacity, but they will of similar scale. You take a 1500# bison, it will dress to 1000# of meat. You will need to process 70-100 loads of meat alone. The time required being several days of 24/7 processing.
I've looked hard at canning as a means of storing food. I have 2 canners which really gives me a boost when I have time to do it. For the cost of the single use lid, maximizing calories is what I have concluded to be my best use. This does not mean you should do the same thing, your objective can be whatever you like, and the description you made of a complete package is one I may consider doing myself.
Your next consideration is consuming what you store. While the stuff will have a shelf life of several years, eventually you need to get through them all. 70 loads of 7 quarts of bison will give you a pound of bison for a meal every couple of days for years. Its tasty, but appetite fatigue will set in before too long, ans you'll still have hundreds of pounds to go through.
I've gone with diversification. Chicken, pot roast, meat balls, meat sauce, chunky meat sauce, chunks of pork, beef stew, chicken livers. Different meats have different properties. WARNING: DO NOT CAN HOT DOGS OR SMOKED HAM. Hot dogs turn into mush, the smoke in the ham ruins the meat as a result of the canning process.
The chicken is delicious: I buy a 10 pound sack of thighs and drumsticks, runs about 5 bucks. First I remove the skins and excess fat. I will render these to draw off the grease for cooking. Then the skins go into the oven to make crisps or are fed to the hens. The meat is washed and put on a good simmer. When fully cooked and cooled, I separate the meat, with the bones and cartilage going to the hens. Bones are later crushed with cinder blocks and added to the compost heap. The meat goes into jars along with the stock from the simmer pot. The remaining stock is reduced until it is dark and full of flavor, then run through a seive. I'll get 7 pounds of meat, a pint of grease, and a couple of quarts of rich stock ready to make gravy. All of this will fit in a single canner load. Anything that wont fit becomes dinner that night.
I find the chicken to be the best stuff. The flavor is intensified because it is dark meat and has been simmered with the bones. Upon opening the jars, the aroma will be STRONG. It may take a little bit of getting used to. This chicken meat is the most versatile ingredient in my pantry. Open the jar, eat it straight-I've taken it to work for lunch. Drain the stock (and save for later use), the meat makes a fine chicken salad sandwich. Use the stock when making rice, throw the meat into a casserole, use the entire jar in a soup/stew/pot pie. Looking at the numbers, a pint jar holds an easy 12 ounces of chicken, and costs about a buck. By comparison, a 5 oz of tuna is 79¢. In a crisis situation, the volume of meat in a pint jar mixed into some noodles or soup can offer 3-4 people a reasonable amount of protien for a day, with noticeable flavor, appealing texture, and a little bit of gravy to round things out.
I use pints and quarts. There is no quarantee that I will have refrigeration when I open up a jar. Living alone, I can use a pint of meat in a single meal. A quart will require refrigeration of leftovers.
Chicken livers are delicious with brown gravy and noodles. Toss an onion and some mushrooms in there, you got a tasty meal. I can grow the onions, probably the mushrooms if I had the time to get the project going. Chicken livers are dirt cheap, a pound mostly fits in a pint jar. I give them a rinse, fill the jars and process without further effort. Quick and easy.
For meat sauce I use a blend of ground beef, turkey and pork. Being that ground meats have such a high surface area and are readily exposed to bacteria during production, I cook ground meats fully before filling the jars. As an added degree of safety, I add tomato sauce to increase the acidity of the product. The sauce also serves to allow air bubbles to escape during jar filling. Beef and pork can be fatty while turkey is lean. By simmering the meat sauce beforehand I can remove much of the resulting grease. Ground turkey is about half the price of ground beef, so I can stretch my food bill along with my canning volume. This is just the meat. There is not enough tomato sauce to make a great dish, so I will add more sauce, tomato paste and all the flavorings at meal prep time. While nothing stops me from making a complete sauce before filling the jars, this method of storing just the meat allows flexibility when I open the jar: taco meat, pasta sauce, lasgana, chili, or I can give it a light rinse to make a stroganoff. Eating the meat right out of the jar will find it a bit bland using this method. After about 3 years, the texture of ground meat will tend towards chewy. Being small to begin with, there is not a whole lot of chewing needed.
Pork can be a fatty meat. I've taken entire pork shoulders, carved off the fat (save it in the freezer for the beans), diced the meat and processed in jars. Hot water is added to fill my jars. I find the particular cut of pork to come out a bit stringy after a couple of years. Still, I can open a jar, cook up some rice with the jar stock, add the pork, and end up with a meal that will fill me and let me do some hard work. While I have trimmed the fat, I still end up with a layer of grease on the top of the jar, anywhere from a quarter inch to an inch thick. Spoon it out, use it for cooking.
I dont add vegetables to these jars. They can become mushy real easy, throwing off the entire batch. I do my vegetables all by themselves. With an active garden, I can usually find something to add to the dish when I open the meat jar.
I dont add gravy to the jars. All to often commercial gravy mixes have ingredients that dont behave in a canning jar. They can ruin the meat. For beef stew, I add gravy and thicken it when I open the jar. Pay particular attention to smoked ingredients. The smoke flavor, in my experience, intensifies to such a degree during canning that the food is absolutely disgusting. I also do not add salt to the jars. I can add salt at the table.
I do not can beans. Those things will store just fine in a dry container. I'll cook them up when I need them.
When the garden is going well and I have some time on my hands, I put up a canner load, sometimes 2 in a week. All jars are labeled, dated, and rotated on the shelf. Its not a whole lot, but I only open up a couple of jars in a week. My food storage is growing slowly but steadily. If I get way ahead on something, say the chicken, I'll stop putting that up and increase my consumption by a jar a month until storage levels are in line with reasonability."
http://peakoil.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=62713&p=1076731#p1076731