Q and A: Canning ham and storing meat

Canning ham

Can you “can” store bought hams? If so how much time should you process it

Connie Gann
Rogersville, Missouri

Yes, definitely. I have one in my fridge right now to can up! You will process pints and half pints for 75 minutes and quarts for 90 minutes at 10 pounds pressure. If you live at an altitude above 1,000 feet, consult your canning book for directions on increasing your pressure to suit your altitude, if necessary. (Or buy my canning book, Growing and Canning Your Own Food, it has directions on canning store ham and tons and tons of other recipes that are not found in other canning books!) — Jackie

Storing meat

Just wondering if you can your pig that was processed or where you keep it. You don’t have a freezer right? Next question, I want to raise chickens in the spring for the first time. Layers and fryers. From what I’ve been told the fryers are all ready in 6 weeks. Is that the process you go thru and then can them all up or do you just butcher as you need them. If so-what breed do you use, because they can get to big right? As always you are amazing, and I thank you so much

Jacqueline Wieser
Sidney, Nebraska

I will be canning some of our pork. But we DO have a freezer, just purchased two months ago in order to have space to store our beef through most of the winter so I can can up that a little at a time. It is a small, upright freezer with Energy Star ratings and we have it on our unheated enclosed back porch to further save energy. So far, it’s working out just fine.

As for the chickens, we have white rock, cuckoo marans, white laced red cornish, and cochins. We crossed white rock roosters with our cornish hens and got our own home-hatched meat birds. The cochins, we hope, will hatch this year’s batch for us so we don’t have to use the incubator, as they are setting fools. Our meat birds could have been butchered at 6 weeks, but we prefer to wait until the weather is cooler and do a few at a time. Now we have the freezer, we can do several at a time instead of the three that was my limit for cooling in the fridge overnight and canning up the next day. Our first generation crosses aren’t as fast growing or quite as wide in the breast as commercial crosses, but they are plenty good enough for us. Regular cornish rock broilers DO get big fast and need to be butchered between 6-9 weeks because they start having health issues (bad legs and heart attacks) after that age. Plain old dual-purpose breeds like buff orpington or white rock are good for both meat and eggs. They don’t get as big as fast or have as much breast meat as do the cornish rock broilers, but they are pretty good eating and live a long, productive life as layers. — Jackie