I’d love to follow my grandmother’s example in home-canning just about everything, but frankly in earthquake country those glass jars just don’t make sense (as she’s learned to her dismay).
Imagine my joy upon learning that you can follow the same sort of pressure-canning process, but with commercially-available steel cans rather than Mason jars!
Soon-to-be-son-in-law recently showed us the fruits of his first kill with the .243 Encore, a can of wild boar stew. It was canned by a friend of his who has an ancient hand-steel-can-sealer. Off I went to the Internet, and this is what I found!
If the choice for a new hobby to get into this Christmas is between reloading or home canning, I think I’ll take canning for now. Cost seems about the same.
I never realized this was available for home canning – too cool. I’m not in earthquake country, so I’ll probably still can in jars – but this would certainly be a good option to have…have you found a source for cans? The one I’ve found that lists prices online seems a bit pricey.
Oh – and I wanna reload, too!
This means that you will need some sort of labeling scheme. Why not pretty those drab cans up with full-coverage labels?
You can buy a variety of them here: http://www.alottalabels.com/
or you might design something online at Avery.com, and use one of their label systems templates to print it.
It’s all busy-work, and if you don’t want busywork, just get #8160 labels and Avery’s template for them, and you have 5 lines of about 50 characters to use, can print individual labels or a whole sheet of 30 at a time.
As an aside, I would consider using a food site like CalorieKing.com to get your nutrition basics and put those on an additional label. If you have to live out of those cans for more than a few days, you will want to know what your nutrition intake is, so you can keep energized but not eat up your stores too quickly.
BTW, when you figure out how to can GOOD ham or bacon properly, let us know…
BTW2, if you find any data on canning AMMO (or reloading components), let us know.
Scott, I haven’t looked up the source of cans yet, but that’s next on the list of things to do. RD, I just posted a pic of my soon-to-be-son-in-law with the wild boar stew can; I’ll have to find out how they did the label on it ’cause it’s pretty kewl.