Canned ground beef

It was a lot of work, but Anne finished canning the meat yesterday. She ran eight canner loads in four days. It takes longer when canning on the wood stove than it does on a conventional stove. So, two loads in a day is pretty good.

We ended up with 25 quarts of shredded meat from the roasts and 61 pints of ground beef.

We’ve got at least three very full 20-quart stock pots of bones to cook down for broth. We’ll start that this weekend. They’ll cook for at least a full day, extracting lots of good stuff out of the bones and making a rich broth. There ought to be several more quarts of meat and some of broth to can from that. Then, there is some fat to be rendered. That will be used for making soap sometime, or it will be used in cooking.

It’s nice to have the meat. We’ll be doing it again next year, God willing. We have another steer which will be 18 or 19 months old in a year from now. He’s a beef breed (Belted Galloway-Angus cross), so he ought to have a little more meat on his bones than Chucky Joe did (he was a Guernsey).