Canning Sausage

My friend and her husband will soon be having two hogs butchered and so she is trying to get her freezers cleared out.  Yesterday she gave me 13 pounds of bulk sausage.  She suggested I could can it, so that's exactly what I did!  I ended up with 8 pints of sausage patties and 11 pints of the meat, browned in our big skillet.

 Here is how it came.  I left it overnight in these Styrofoam coolers so it could thaw slowly.  It worked perfectly.  It was still partially frozen so that made it easy to slice the patties.

Here are 3 pounds browning...

This shows you how they were sliced:

 

Here the slices are browning:

 

I was able to fit 5 patties into each wide-mouth pint jar.

It took both canners to accommodate the 19 jars.

 The jars just came out of the canners:

After cooling for a while.  I did not put on any extra liquid before they were processed.

Canning meats is very easy... much easier than canning vegetables.  These pints had to be pressure canned for 75 minutes at 11 pounds pressure, after 10 minutes of "exhausting" the canners.  If you want to do this, and have not canned before, please be sure to consult a reliable canning guide like this one.

Canned meat will last for a long time in the jars without losing quality.  It is very convenient to have in the pantry for quick meals.