Bottled Corned Beef

Since it’s a great time of the year to buy Corned Beef Briskets cheap at the store for St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to try my hand at bottling corned beef.  I figured that the real thing would be a million times better than the usual particle corned beef you can buy at the store.

Basically, the process is identical to bottling any other meat.  Simply cut the brisket into pieces, and put the raw meat into your mason jar.  Each corned beef brisket comes with a separate seasoning packet.  Evening distribute the seasoning packet amongst the jars.

Process the meat according to regular meat bottling pressure and times.

To use the meat for traditional corned beef recipes, simply open a jar and add it to any recipe (ie. Corned beef and cabbage).  You may want to strain the chunky seasonings out of the broth surrounding the meat.

Pressure Canning Processing Steps

Pressure Canning Processing Steps

Bottled Sausage and Other Ground Meats

So, this is my first time bottling sausage.  I'm anxious to actually open a bottle and taste it.  Someone once told me that it was important to precook ground meats like burger and sausage before bottling it, in order to preserve the flavor.  They said that if you don't precook the ground meats, they end up tasting like dog food.  Who wants to eat dog food?  Not me...so I took their word for it, and chose to precook my sausage meat.

I had 16 lbs of sausage, but only cooked up 13 lbs of it.  That was by far the most labor intensive part.  I loaded the pint jars, and put them in the pressure cooker...that was the easiest part.  Then I just had to wait for the jars to pressurize and steam for 75 minutes.  And here is a picture of my labors.