Adventures in canning

Today's fun project was to train Handsome Hombre in the fine art of pressure canning meat.

It took us about a half-hour to fill 15, pint-jars with cut up chicken breasts. The local market had a sale on them for $2.49 a pound. I wanted this to be a simple training session so I opted to use chicken that was ready-to-go.

Because I was curious to "blueprint" the performance of the canner and the 1000W hot-pad I took measurements.

The temperature at the start of the run was about 60F. No time was recorded.

At 11:49 the temperature was 157F.

12:09 it was 175F (about a degree a minute)

1:36 it crossed the magic 240F where I can start the timer. The bogey for pint jars of meat are 75 minutes above 240F.

The temperature continued to rise and plateaued at 2:01 at 254F (and 16PSIG).

What that tells me is that my particular pressure canner came from the factory with enough "extra" pressure to safely can meat up-to 10,000 feet of elevation. Outside of a few towns in Colorado, that means just about everywhere in the United States. 

If you decide to use 240F to start your timing instead of when the weight starts singing and dancing, it is convenient to use an infrared thermometer. If you do, then it is worth your time to spray a patch of the side of the kettle with flat, black paint. Otherwise, your device will be reading the background reflected in the shiny aluminum.

Editorializing

I told Handsome Hombre that one of the consequences of smaller families is that each member had to be able to do more things. A large family might have 40 cousins. One cousin (or their spouse) would surely be a mechanic or a carpenter or a good gardener or a...

But when families are only one, two or three kids then there are many fewer cousins. So each person has to be able to wear more hats and be able to perform an adequate job of the task.

I am cross-training HH so he knows how to take advantages of windfalls. I will be surprised if he doesn't purchase a pressure canner (and maybe an IR thermometer) and have it shipped back to his homeland.