Canned Turkey

I've been pretty busy this week with school and house stuff. I've finally gotten some motivation to do some deep cleaning. Aside from that, we canned one of the turkeys we bought. Craig and I make a good team - he de-bones and I can. If you decide to try this sometime, make sure you follow the directions exactly as they come in your canning booklet that comes with the canner. You definitely do not want to mess around with meat. We have a 16 quart pressure canner/cooker which is great for this kind of thing. After Craig de-boned the turkey, I cut it up into canning size portions and cooked in our small pressure cooker for about 5 minutes. It was just barely done with a little pink still in the meat. I then stuffed the meat into quart size jars and filled with boiling water and then processed for an hour and 15 minutes.

We love having the canned turkey. We use it in the place of canned chicken and every time it has been very tasty. I think I  might like the flavor better too. I was able to get 7 quarts out of this turkey and have one more turkey that still needs to be done.

I've also been canning the broth I make from the turkey carcasses. I've done broth for 2 so far by boiling all the insides and bones for several hours. Then I let it cool, skim off the fat, heat it to boiling and pour into hot quart jars. Then I pressure can them for about 25 minutes.

The turkey haul up to this point has been:

20 lbs ground turkey

7 quarts canned turkey

9 quarts turkey broth

I still have one more turkey to can and 2 carcasses left to make broth. I think that's quite a haul for 4 turkeys that we bought for around $40. This should last us until next Thanksgiving when we can do it all over again!