Canning Chicken

This week, Safeway also had chicken on sale for $1.99 a pound for the boneless, skinless chicken breast, which is the best for canning because there is little/no waste.

You get your chicken all unpacked and ready to cook. You can also raw pack chicken and can it that way, but for my first time, I decided to cook it. Well my mom actually did that for me, because I was in school for 7 hours today. Ah the joy of being a professional student.

We cook our meat in our huge roaster oven. Most people who are reading this probably don't have a huge roaster oven, but you can cook it in your regular oven as well. Cook your meat at 350 degrees until the chicken on the top is tender. Then you can turn the oven off and it will continue cooking even as its cooling.

When the chicken is cooled, you will pull it out of the pan and clean it. We put it in a cookie sheet and it will cool down even more.

As you clean it, you will shred the chicken to put into your jars for canning.

Here is how much meat I had when it was all finished cooking. You may have less depending on how much you want to can, but I wanted to do enough for this semester because I'm going to be so busy with nursing school I won't have time to go grocery shopping or do very much cooking!

(These are all the pictures I have. We forgot to take the camera out as we were finishing, but I will explain it well from here on out!)

You will wash your jars out in the sink and then fill them with the chicken almost all the way full. You will leave a little space though. You fill up the rest of the jar with water (Or the chicken broth from when you cooked your chicken, water works just fine as well.) Then you add 1/2 teaspoon of salt to every jar. I canned my chicken into pints because it is only going to be me and Chris. And we won't need a whole quart of chicken for the both of us. That's a lot of food! Then you put  your lids on and put the jars into the pressure cooker and can at 10 pounds of pressure for 60 minutes if the meat is cooked, and for about an hour and a half if its not cooked. Then you pull them out of the pressure cooker and now you have chicken on your shelves! Yay! Out of the chicken I did today, I was able to get 25 jars. That is two flats and one extra jar! It's not very hard, and it will be worth it when you have it on your shelve for your peace of mind.