Canning bacon - jars floating in pressure canner.

[Cedar]

on your bacon ends - do you cut off all the fat, 80%, 50%, 30%?

0% is cut off. I use a wide mouth canning funnel and stuff it into the jars and it comes out of the package. I use the 'rendered' suet/lard too.

Cedar - (and someone must be right, I must not sleep... it is after midnight again and I am not in bed yet)

[Morning Sunshine]

Update on this.

I bought 88 pounds of bacon this week - there was a sale without limits. 
I wanted to cut off a lot of the fat this time as the last batch of jars were uneven - some were mostly fat and some had more bacon; it was hard to know what I would get when I grabbed a jar.

I figured 2 pounds of bacon to get 1 jar of meat.  And, what-do-ya-know?  My gut was right.  I ended up using 67 1# packages of bacon = 38 pint jars (14oz/jar)

1072 total oz = 532 oz meat + 540oz fat

I took all that lovely bacon fat and stuffed into a few crockpots to render down like lard.  I have 3 half-gallon jars ready to store, and still some more to go.  Can I store that shelf stable?  Shall I keep it in the fridge?  Should I move it to quart jars and pressure can like I do lard?

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couple other points.
I guess you could eat it directly out of the jar, but the texture is like boiled bacon - ick.  So I pour the whole jar into a cast iron skillet and fry it up to crispy before we use it.
the weird liquid in the bottom of the jars?  duh - it is bacon broth.


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pressure canned at 13 pps for 75 minutes.  I refuse to use Tattler lids on the bacon.  I have too many failures, so this is the one item for which I keep a stash of metal lids on hand.

[LvsChant]

+1 MS

[Stwood]

We have lard we processed up 2 years ago and it's stored on a shelf.
Wife uses lard numerous times a week.

We have fat in the freezer from 2 hogs we need to get processed into lard.

[Morning Sunshine]

Remember all that bacon fat?  I stuffed it into a couple of large crockpots for a few days on low or warm (I switched back and forth) and drained the liquids out every 8 hours or so.

At the end I have 4 GALLONS of bacon grease.  And 8 1-lb packages of "cracklins" I think they are called - the bacon meat that was too small to take out of the fat, but fried up nicely as the fat was rendered off.  That was an unexpected treat.

I am going to get some disposable plastic containers and pour the melted fat into those and freeze them as bricks in 1 pint blocks.

[Stwood]

Sounds good. You can can (pun intended) it though.

We didn't end up with the cracklin's though. Too greasy. Grease just hung in there. Actually though, I think the wife got tired of bakin the things and gave up too early.