Canning Venison

I have found that canning venison adds another valuable treat from my fall harvest. Use of a pressure cooker is a must in this process. This makes for a wonderfully tender meal that is loaded with protein and very little fat. We also corn our venison roasts using a traditional method. Good eating!

i couldn't agree with you more (just wished my family hunted still.)..also love canned wild caught fish..even suckers can up beautifully..similar to salmon

We've been doing this for the past 36 years, both with pressure canner and with boiling water bath. It was our staple meat supply as I was growing up and continues to be so today. We do not eat beef or pork and do not eat chicken from the store. We couldn't have survived all these years without the deer harvested with bow kills here on our land.

Jennifer, from Ask Jackie: Pressure Canning:

I’ve canned a whole lot of wild meat: elk, deer, and moose. Basically, you can it up just like you do beef. The times and pressures are the same, which is 75 minutes for pints at 10 pounds pressure and 90 minutes for quarts. I have canned lots of meat raw, but have found that you get more meat in a jar and it ends up more tender if you precook it first. I can up much of my meat as “stew meat,” as you can use it in so many different recipes. It can also easily be shredded for such recipes as barbecued beef and fajita meat.

To do this, I use my huge cast iron frying pan on the wood range, and with minimal shortening I begin frying up the first batch of stew meat. While this cooks, I am also slicing slabs of meat and dicing it up in small pieces. Stirring the cooking meat once in a while, until it begins browning, I continue to make piles of stew meat. Once the first pan of meat has cooked, I add water to cover and perhaps some powdered beef soup stock powder.

When the meat has simmered a few minutes, I dump the works in a big pot, add a little fresh grease to the frying pan, and start frying down the next batch. This goes on until the pot holds about all my canner will process in one batch. (My huge old canner will do 9 quarts and 22 pints at one load.)

I reheat the pot of meat until it is all hot, then dip out the meat and pack it into my jars to within an inch of the top, ladling out enough of the broth to just cover it. The jars are then sealed and processed.

While this is going on, I prepare the next batch. Steaks and roasts are done by cutting the meat into pieces half an inch or one inch thick that will slide into wide-mouth jars. These are browned lightly and water and/or broth made with beef stock added as with the stewing meat.

You can raw pack your meat as well, but as I’ve said, it really isn’t faster as you must heat the jars of meat after they are packed, before you process it. And it seems a little more tough than the meat you precook and pack in liquid. But, here’s how you do it.

Pack the cold (not frozen) raw meat loosely in wide-mouth jars for roasts and steaks; regular jars for stewing meat. Leave the jars open and place in a pot of hot water so that the boiling water cannot boil up into the jars of meat. Boil this pot until the meat reaches 170°F in the center of the most densely packed jar. Then add a tsp. of salt to the quarts and a ½ tsp. to the pints and seal the jars. Do not add liquid. Process quarts for 90 minutes and pints for 75 minutes. This method is not advised by experts because folks have “cheated” and not used a thermometer and processed raw meat that was not hot enough, ending up with bad food.

She's so great.

You're welcome! Her books and articles are full of good stuff. I just remembered a lengthy article she wrote on canning meat, and in issue #74 of Backwoods Home Magazine she has a really long article on field dressing, butchering and preserving wild deer, moose and elk.

You're most welcome! I love this forum too, I don't have much experience but do read a lot. She blogs most days too, a veritable fountain of knowledge. She's a very inspiring person, I wouldn't have ended up here if not for reading BHM. That's what set me on the path of self-sufficiency, which led to permaculture.

If you go here you'll find the articles of hers which are free.

Hi Jennifer,
Yes, there is a new excellent website about canning meats. It is called https://www.foodpreservationmethods.com go to meat, poultry, fish and vegetables section. The site carries reliable material which is based on government regulations. There is plenty of information about canning in glass jars, metal cans and using can sealers.

Thank you, John! I can't wait to get myself a really good pressure cooker and try my hand at this. I really hate relying on the freezer.

I love canning venison, we have depredation permits on the farm, so we eat ALOT of deer meat, it's probably 90% of our meat consumption. The one trick to using canned venison is to make a nice broth FIRST, then add that to the jars and can it in the pressure canner... all that is simple, however when you are USING the canned meat, it has already been cooked to heck and back so say you're making a stew... use the broth from the jar in the stew, and then at the end, put the meat into the pot after the stew is already done. Otherwise it just ends up dissolving

When I was about 13 my father shot a problem black bear, in June, while he and I were at a primitive gold mining camp about 50 miles from the nearest road, town, or navigable stream. We and the camp security husky dog ate all we could, but it was clear we'd have a lot of waste, given that we lacked any kind of refrigeration. So he rounded up all the empty quart jars that we'd eaten the pressure-canned Yukon River salmon out of, and did a careful inspection of the used rings and lids. Ultimately we had 8 jars with lids good enough he thought he could re-use them. He filled the jars with cubes of bear meat that he'd dipped in seasoned flour and browned in a fry pan. Then he put them in our biggest pot (four at a time) and water-bathed canned them (very carefully) on our Coleman whitegas camp stove. He told me at the time that "you're not supposed to" use water-bath canning for meat, but he thought we'd get away with it. Which we did. One seal failed after a few days (the dog got that one) but the rest was very tasty and lasted throughout the summer. We ate "creamed bear on toast" (we baked bread and pies and cinnamon rolls every Sunday) about once a week all summer.