Our first pressure canner arrives today. Went with a Presto digital unit. I have a few cases of quart, pint, and half pint jars. Want to can stuff from the garden in the fall, but what store bought stuff should I start canning now to store back?  

I’m thinking meats and stews first because this is a gap in my preps. I’d love ideas of stuff like Gumbo that can just be heated up and dumped over rice. We have a lot of rice.  I also read about canning ground beef and that it lasts 3-5 yrs in the shelf. That sounds handy.

Please share your ideas and recipes!

Do small amounts for testing/tasting to start.

You can always start with condiments until the crops come in.

Homemade Ketchup and BBQ can actually save money.
https://www.food.com/recipe/amish-tomato-ketchup-for-canning-44061

https://creativehomemaking.com/recipes/canning/barbecue-sauce/

The other thing is that both can be canned with meat to make them tasty.  Pulled pork and chicken are pretty good and can be made up in reasonable quantities using family pack meats.

Beef or chicken.

Both, once canned are available for quick meals.  Much faster than frozen, and retain flavor.

We also can a fair bit of fruit, primarily pears and peaches but that’s a fall thing.

Venison.

We can everything that most people would grind and stick in the freezer.  We have enough stuff in the freezer between the pigs and beef we have butchered.  


For canning raw venison(or any red meat really).

Cube meat into 1" or so
Raw back, we cram as much as we can into wide mouth quart jars, but we have a large family.  Leave 1"ish of headspace
We throw a spoon of kosher salt in on top(throw some garlic, onions, pepper, etc. in there...whatever you like)
Put the lids and bands on, process at 10lbs for 75 minutes

Mostly, we just heat it in a pan, mashed potatoes and corn as sides.  However we also put it in chili, bbq sandwiches, venison stroganoff, tacos, etc.  Pretty much everything you use ground beef for that you brown up in a pan and break apart, you can use the canned venison for.  Texture is different, but it works the same.  


We have eaten cans of venison 12 years old that got lost in the back of the shelf....I wouldn't recommend doing that, but I'm still here to tell the story lol.  Taste/texture was the same as the stuff we canned the year before.  

When I started canning, I would go to the farmers market and pick up a few pounds of whatever vegetables I wanted.  Usually carrots, tomatoes, green beans and took them home and can them.

I would let them sit for a month or so before opening them and checking them out for taste and texture.  If I liked them I would do more.

It took me a couple years before I tried meats.  I started with chicken breasts in pint jars.  The PITA always seems to be the long cook time, having to watch the dial and fiddling with the heat so the pressure doesn't go to high to low.

Since then, I've done a bunch of chicken, beef, ground beef and fish.

I got my first pressure canner the end of February.

I've only canned 2 batched so far.

7qts of corned beef, raw pack
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10 pints of hot pork sausage browned and with just a bit of stock added.
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Go to Walmart and pick up this mix. All you have to do is add canned tomatoes and vinegar IIRC.

It's perfect to use as a test of your system and the salsa is damn good.

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Mmmmm corned beef. So I don't really understand raw pack, does the canning cook the meat?  Or Do you still have to cook it when you open it?  Seems weird that you're not supposed to cover the meat in liquid for raw pack too.  I wonder why?

I'm not at all a pro (again I've only done 2 batches), but canning most definitely cooks the meat.  It is cooked under pressure for an hour and half for quart jars.  It could be eaten straight from the jar as with any other canned good, but I am sure that at least warning it up would improve palatability.

As to adding liquid, take a look at my first picture again, no liquid was added, that all came out of the beef.

That makes sense.  Thanks!  I did a hot pack with chicken already, I think I'll try a raw pack next to save a step.

Milsurp ninja, I hope this isn't hijacking your thread but this may be a question you would like answered also. The jars I have bought at a couple of different stores all say that they are good for eighteen months after canning, referring to the seal being good. Is that real, or more of a CYA thing for the company? Eighteen months doesn't seem like a long time to me for a canned product. If it is true, what lids are recommended to buy? Just FYI, I haven't done any canning yet. Thanks.

On the shelf, I have meats and stews, green chili, beans with bacon and beans with ham, lots of other things. We use our pressure counter quite a bit actually. We’ve also been doing the cold water bath canning. In which we make salsa, pickled asparagus, pickled eggs etc. We love canning our own recipes.




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I did 6 pints of ground beef last night, and this morning 5 out of 6 lids didn't seal (didn't suck in).  This isn't as easy as I thought!  One thing different from last time when I canned chicken was I used Golden Harvest jars and lids.  Maybe we didn't wipe the rims well enough?  Looks like I left enough headspace.  I also didnt heat the lids/rings, but maybe I should have?

How long did you have it to temperature?

What temperature?

What PSI? At what elevation above sealevel?

This is where I started. YouTube is your friend.

Processed for 75 minutes.  Elevation is 670'.  Temperature and pressure are controlled by the presto digital canner.  Recipe was from the instruction book.  I'll watch the video, thanks!  I'm determined to get this figured out.

How tight did you put the rings on the jar before canning?  It is possible to have them too tight or too loose.  You want the pressure that builds in the jar to be able to sneak out around the lid gasket, while being at the same time being tight enough to hold the vacuum when the temperature lowers.  With 5 of the six not sealing, and your still learning the process, I would suspect this before a bad batch of lids.

As an added note: we are starting to get limited deliveries of Ball brand bulk lids.  We were also given lids to test by one of our suppliers for new manufacturer out of Ohio.  Lids are being made in the USA with USA components.  The parent company specializes in automotive seals and gaskets.  The process of canning should inflict a whole lot less stress, temperature and chemical issues than automotive seals, So we are looking forward to testing the lids.  The largest difference I have noted with the lids is the gasket material is blue, somewhat more flexible, and quite a bit thicker than the Jarden (parent company of Ball and Kerr) brand lids.  The thicker gasket should allow the gasket to flex a bit more, which may give a little mroe room for error but I guess we will see.

I am guessing here, but I believe the thicker seal will allow better grasping of the jars, as well as increased reusability of the lids - not recommended, but often done in our household.  One of the advertised selling points of the new lids are they were tested for resealing 10 times.  Again, they are careful not to recommend the practice, but we often reuse lids for less critical products, something like applesauce, where reprocessing does not affect the consistency or quality of the product.

Note: our testing of the new lids is focused on reliability of seal consistency during vacuum packaging in a chamber vac, in particular, how to the seals hold up during the sealing of course (grains) and fine product (flour).  Something like flour is often an issue where a vacuum pump tends to draw some of the powder into the seal during the air extraction process.  We are running pressure canning and water bath canning tests also.  We will not have enough sample lids to try dry heat oven canning this time, hopefully within the next month we will get some product from the production line.

I screwed them on until I just felt the smallest bit of resistance.  When they were done processing, the rings were quite loose.

I believe we would usually tighten the lids a bit tighter than that, we will often turn 1/4 to 1/2 additional turn after the initial friction point.  The newer lids I referenced above, took a little more turning, I believe due to the increased gasket thickness.  Our rings will sometimes be loose, but I would not call them very loose.

Best of luck, you can still freeze what did not seal, and try again with fresh product.  Better to learn now in a non critical time than later.

@lumper Thanks a lot for the advice, I tried again and tightened the lids more and all jars sealed!  

I have a vacation coming up and I'm going to try to can something

What would be a good first time? I was thinking ground beef or potatoes