Remember:  home-canning meat or low-acid vegetables requires a pressure cooker and specific techniques to be sure you don’t home-can your own version of botulism.  If you’re interested in learning how to home-can almost anything, get the Ball Blue Book of Preserving and learn how!

If you like to be thrifty and save money, you’ll save a bundle by canning your own chicken.

In hindsight, I probably should have bought two of these 10-lb bags of leg quarters so I could have done a full canning load of about 6 quarts.

As with all my canning recipes, I spread out the steps over a few days, sometimes even weeks.  I do this mostly, because I don’t like to spend 4 or 5 straight hours getting a “canning session” completed.

So, after I bought the bag above, it sat in my freezer for about a week.  Two days before I planned on canning the chicken I placed the bag in the fridge so it would be reasonably thawed out.

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Day 1

Place the 10lbs of leg quarters into your giant crock pot.  I was barely able to get all the chicken into my crock pot.

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Turn on the crock on the high setting and fill with water to within 1/4 inch of the top of the crock.  Keep an eye on the liquid level.  My chicken was still frozen in the middle and the liquid level rose a little after an hour and I had to take a little liquid out.

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After cooking on high for about an hour, I set the crock pot on low and cook for another 2 hours.  The goal here is to not cook it all the way, but only about 3/4 of the way.  The canning process will cook the meat fully.  After the two hours is up, I place the chicken into a large plastic bowl and let cool for about 10 minutes.

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Place bowl into freezer for about 10 minutes to cool it down.

(Yes, those are dandelion flowers… but that’s another post)  

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After the chicken has cooled significantly, take it out and cut/pull the skin off the leg quarters.

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I’m done for the day, so I place the 3/4 cooked chicken into the fridge.

(yes, the jar to the left is homemade strawberry jam and the jars in the back are canned milk)

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Day 2

Pull all the meat off of the leg quarters and place them into a large pot and fill with water.

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Add salt and bring meat just to a boil and simmer for about 5 minutes

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Get your jars, caps, and lids ready.  Place product into jars, fill to within 1 inch of top of jar with broth from pot.

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Get rid of any air bubbles

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Note I got three full jars of boneless chicken and one jar I put in the rest of the broth for use in another recipe

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Place jars into pressure cooker and cook at 10psi for 1 hour and 30 minutes.

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tada!

Well, great, you say, what do I do with all this chicken now?  Use it as you would any other canned chicken product.  You can put it into chicken helper, make your own chicken noodle soup, make chicken sandwiches, put into chicken salads, etc..   Or you can just store it until you need it.