Canning Beef

As I noted a few weeks ago, I've canned some chicken.  After years of dreading using the pressure canner, I finally hauled it out and learned that it wasn't at all bad.  With the sporadic meat supply in the spring of 2020, canning it seems like a good approach rather than relying on same-day purchase (freezing is another option, but apparently everyone had the same idea and freezers sold out, so unless the capacity was on hand in early 2020, it wasn't an option).

I decided to try beef next.  I've bought canned roast beef before, and it has ranged from dreadful to not bad. Commercially-canned beef is a bit hard to find now, too, and its cost is comparable to home-canned...with the right kind of beef.  This obviously isn't an exercise to undertake with ribeye steaks or tenderloins. Chuck roast seemed like a reasonable cut to try.

I got two different three-pound roasts and cut them up.  The cutting process took about 45 minutes or so; I used an approach similar to that for making bread cubes for stuffing.  I just cut the meat into reasonable-sized pieces.

As the picture shows, the beef was seamed with fat.  I also trimmed some solid fat off.

As with the chicken, I got a little over 13 ounces in each jar; after accounting for the removed fat, I ended up with 7 jars--one of those had only 12 ounces in it.

The processing time was the same as for chicken--75 minutes, but I stretched it to 80.  After taking them out of the canner, they were seriously cooked (the short one is on the far right).

As they cooled, they all compressed down somewhat, and the fat visible at the top congealed.

I broke one open a few days later to try it.  It wasn't bad, but also wasn't good enough to justify 3x the cost of chicken breast.  If you have your own side of beef to process, it makes sense.  Otherwise, maybe not so much.