Can you imagine bottled meat?

Americans are a funny bunch. They’ll call any lump of meat a ‘roast’, whether they’re
planning on roasting it, or not. Mince it, and it’s ‘hamburger’, whether you’re going to make burgers with it or not. Add salt and spices and it’s ‘sausage’, whether you stuff it in a sausage skin or not. So, what do they mean by ‘canning’ food? Hint: it doesn’t involve cans.

Canning is preserving food in glass jars. Australians will be familiar with this from the old Fowlers Vacola system of ‘bottling’ fruit (see, it’s not just the Americans who use funny words). Bottled fruit is great, but you know what’s even better? Bottled meat!

I’ve never seen it in my lifetime, but I’m told in the old days they used to preserve meat using the Fowlers Vacola system. Nowadays it’s definitely a huge no-no, because it can lead to some nasty types of food poisoning.

But here’s where the American system of home canning gets interesting. The Fowlers Vacola system is limited to acidic foods. That means fruit, and some vegetables if they’re pickled in vinegar. The Americans have a way around this limitation: pressure canning.

Pressure canning involves heating jars of food under pressure. Inside a pressure canner set to 15 pounds per square inch, water doesn’t boil when heated to 100°C. Instead it keeps heating up to 121°C before it boils. The extra heat makes all the difference, killing a range of bugs ordinary boiling water won’t, including Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria responsible for causing botulism. Where boiling water bottling relies on acid to keep the bugs at bay, pressure canning avoids the need for acid by killing the bugs outright.

Pressure canning means you can have cooked, ready-to-use game meat, fish, stew, soup or stock sitting in your pantry, or at work, or in your car, or in your hunting and camping gear. Unopened, it will keep without refrigeration for at least a year. It’s tasty and convenient and saves on freezer space.

All you need to get started with pressure canning is a pressure vessel, some jars, and some instructions. To avoid poisoning your loved ones, make sure you use the right gear. The United States Department of Agriculture publishes the Complete Guide to Home Canning. The instructions and recipes in the guide are based on actual testing to ensure food safety, and is available for free online, so it should be your bible.

The USDA instructions are based on a type of jar called a Mason jar, the most common brand being Ball. Ball Mason jars sell for about $2 to $4 each in Australia. Don’t be tempted by cheaper knockoffs, they may not withstand the heat of pressure canning. One part of the Mason 2-piece jar lid is not reusable, so eventually you’ll want some extra lids too.
The USDA guide also insists on using a purpose-made pressure canner that (unlike pressure cookers) can be relied on to reach 15 psi of pressure and maintain it. At around $250 for the 23-quart model, the Presto brand is by far the cheapest I’ve found, works perfectly for me, and gets good reviews. (Could you use one of the cheaper Ball preserving kits from Big W? No. These are not pressure canners, so are only suitable for high-acid foods like fruit and pickles.)

About now I bet some people are scratching their heads about pulling a roast or a steak out of a jar. Nope, that’s not how it works!

Do you like stew? Canned meat is essentially stewed. The USDA instructions for meat ask for a bit over an hour in the canner. In a pressure cooker, meat cooks about three times faster than normal, and it’s the same in a canner. So, what you end up with is beautiful fork-tender stew meat, similar to what you’d get from slow cooking in a casserole or camp oven for over three hours.

There’s nothing wrong with just eating the tasty meat straight out of the jar or shredding it into a sandwich. But there are other options: use it to make jaffles, pies, soup or curry. Or, make a thin stew (thickened liquids are a no-no) in the first place and can that, ready-to-eat.

The foundation of every good stew or soup is stock, and here’s where a pressure canner offers you extra value. A pressure canner is basically a big stockpot (the Presto holds 22 litres) that can work under pressure, so yes, you can use it to make stock, and do it in a third of the time it would normally take. Once it’s done, put it in jars and pressure process them, and you can have stock on hand any time you need it, again without taking up freezer space.

Beyond meat, fish and stock, pressure canning opens other doors. I marinated and canned part of my autumn harvest of wild mushrooms so I could enjoy them throughout the year. If you’re super-keen or a doomsday prepper, you can also preserve any vegetable you like using a pressure canner.

Contributed by Russell Edwards.