Canning Hamburger Patties

On my little blog here, you know the one I started because none of our family lives in Texas.  I wanted our family to be able to enjoy and share with us the kids childhood.  Fast forward ten years many of the family have passed on, plus two of the kids have now graduated high school and the third will graduate in two years!

The traffic I get on the blog these days seems to be homeschooling, Bible Bowl, softball and canning related!  The other day I received a message from one of the blog followers asking if I had ever tried canning hamburger patties. That was new!!

So I started doing some research.  The USDA does find canning ground beef to be safe but USDA canning procedures for ground meat call for it to be canned in a jar with an unthickened liquid: water, a broth, or tomato juice. You are allowed to form ground meat into patties, or meatballs, but they too must be canned in a liquid.

There are a few don'ts.  Don't use eggs or bread crumbs!  There are recipes on the web that use eggs and bread crumbs to hold the patties together, thing meatloaf.  But according to the USDA they aren't safe.

Kroger had their 3 lbs tubes of Ground Chuck on sale, buy one get one free.  It's not the 90/10 I prefer but for a first time experiment that works!

Hamburger Patties

3 lbs Ground Beef

1 diced onions

1/2 diced bell pepper

1 Tablespoon Ranch Dressing

1 Tablespoon Season Salt

1 Tablespoon Beef Bullion

1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

With clean hands, mix up all ingredients. Run you a sink of warm/hot water near where you are working. When you start mixing and mixing and mixing all of these cold ingredients with your washed, cleaned and naked hands you are going to want to plunge them into something very warm every few minutes.

Since I needed the patties to be the same size as my quart jars, I used the lid set of a the wide mouth canning jar. Smash the meat into the lid and ring then push your patty out of the ring.  It will slide right off the lid, the perfect size!

I baked in preheated 375 degree oven for 30 minutes flipping the burgers half way through cooking time. Remember they do not have to be fully cooked you are cooking them to remove fat.  While one pan was cooking I continued to make patties laying them out on waxed paper.  As batches of the hamburgers finished cooking I loaded them in my crock pot to keep them warm.  

Next, working with clean sterilized Ball Wide Mouth Quart Jars, I loaded the burgers and covered them with beef broth. I was able to get six patties per quart jar.  Nine pounds of ground beef yielded 8 quarts of patties.

Process the jars in a Pressure Canner 90 minutes for quarts and 75 minutes for pints with 10 pounds of pressure.

So how did they taste and would I do it again?  They heated up well in a skillet, remember because they are canned you are pulling them off the shelf at room temperature. SO heating time is short I threw some in a skillet to get a little crispy edge.

If I did this again I would use a 90/10 meat because these cooked up small.  I'm not certain they will save me any time but it was a fun experiment.  And it did free up room in my freezer!

Wisdom has built her house;

    she has set up its seven pillars.

She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine;

    she has also set her table.

Proverbs 9:1-2