Canned Meats

I've dabbled in hot water bath canning for the last couple years learning to can a few items. I've done strawberry jam, salsa, pickled dilly beans, beets, peppers, mushrooms and pickles, both hamburger dills and whole pickles. Typing this all out, I guess that is kind of a lot. Mushrooms, pickles and dilly beans I would say are my best tasting and most perfected at this point. I've only done jam once but it was fantastic. I look forward to perfecting the jam this summer and will be blogging about all of my canning adventures during summer/fall.

Most of the recipes I use are from the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and when I look through the book I always quickly pass over the section on canned meat. Canned meat. I'm sure the first thing that pops into anyone's head it SPAM, so needless to say, it doesn't sound that appealing or glamorous. Well this winter I was looking through the Milwaukee Rec Department Adult Enrichment courses and I came across a class, 'Canned Meats'  and I figured maybe I should check it out. There's gotta be better canned meat out there than SPAM.

 

So I took the class. My first question was, what is going to be the meat? It was interesting that it was not specified. My second question was, what kind of people are going to be in a canned meat class? I was pleasantly surprised by the answers.

 

We learned about the world of pressure cooker canning which was uncharted territory for me. You can can (see what I did there?) a lot more food than I thought you could.

 

So the meat was...Corned Beef Hash! One of my faves.

 

I'm not going to go into the details of making the corned beef hash, since we prepped it in the class, but the instructor took care of the canning part afterward due the time it takes, but I will provide a link to the recipe. http://www.sbcanning.com/search?q=corned+beef

 

To answer the second question, it was a wide variety of people. I'd say ages 25-65, both female and male. It was a good group to work with.

 

Here is a picture prior to pressure canning.

 

 

And here is after.

 



 



 

This Saturday I prepared the corned beef hash. I was pretty excited for it since I already like the crappy grocery store canned corned beef hash, I was sure to enjoy this version. All you have to do is drain the water, chop it into smaller pieces, heat it up in a pan with olive oil and get it nice an crispy.

 

 

 

I served it with an over easy egg on the top, side of English muffin and Saturday breakfast is complete!

 



My canning meat experience was so good, I now really want to buy a $200 pressure cooker... Good thing I have Amazon Prime.