Cooking stews or soups with canned beef is easy.
Canning beef preserves it for later consumption. Home cooks can preserve beef by canning it as long as they have pressure cookers and follow the rules for canning meat carefully. All meat must be canned at temperatures well over boiling to kill the bacteria for safe preservation. The best cuts of beef for canning include tough, lean cuts from roasts, like round roasts or sirloin. Add this to my Recipe Box.
Round Steaks
Round steaks or roasts are among the best cuts for canning because they are lean and not heavily marbled. These cuts require long cooking times to tenderize and, while tough, are long on flavor. The outside fat from the steaks needs to be trimmed away and discarded. If you are hot packing the beef, you can add the fat to the cooking liquid, but do not include it in the jars. Most cooks cut the beef into 1-inch or slightly larger cubes.
Sirloin
The bottom sirloin is another good cut of beef for canning. Sirloin is actually a large roast that butchers cut into steaks. Either the roasts or steaks can be cut into cubes. Sirloin has slightly more fat than round roasts or steaks, and all visible fat should be trimmed away to reduce sealing failure in the jars. When using any kind of home canned beef, boil the beef for 10 minutes before tasting or serving it.
Chuck Roasts
Chuck roasts are another tough cut of beef, good for canning once the bones and fat are removed. Like the round steak, adding these to the simmering liquid before canning the beef improves the flavor of the finished product, but do not include them in the jars. You can also use the bones and scraps to make a beef broth, which is easy to can as well.
Beef Ribs and Bones
Beef ribs have little meat, but make a good basis for beef stock for canning. Simmer the ribs over low heat for at least an hour to extract the flavor from the meat and bones. Some cooks chill the cooked broth overnight to congeal the fat layer on top and simply remove it with a spatula before reheating the broth to can it. Processing home, canned beef broth still requires a pressure cooker, but the processing time is considerably less than processing meat.
Tags: beef canning, canned beef, beef broth, best cuts, cubes Sirloin