[yankieGirl]

The 10 pound weight is gently rocking on the top of the pressure canner!

Hubby shot a deer last fall and after dressing and skinning we cut the meat off the bone and froze.

Finally decided what to do with it.  Hope it turns out.

Just thought I'd share.  This kind of event excites a simpleton like me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[SallyintNorth]

I know nothing about canning so don't quite know what it is you are creating or when you can eat it - but congratulations!

[Bright Raven]

Canning is viewed as dragon magic over here in Blighty. It is a real mysterious art, and we have no history of doing it. There was a pressure cooker fad in the 70's but folks generally just boiled up gammon in them then got bored with the idea and took them to the charity shop.
I guess it's the frontier spirit that made canning essential in areas where freezing is unreliable. I am always looking for ways to be more independent and off grid, so canning is defiantly something I want get to grips with. I hope your deer turns out delicious and keeps in a state of perfection. You are in good company for getting excited about home processing. I have just ordered a Bradley Home Smoker with a cold smoke adapter and am working myself up into a similar state of joy. I tell you, if it don't move it's gonna get smoked! Cheers.

[Dan]

I have just ordered a Bradley Home Smoker with a cold smoke adapter and am working myself up into a similar state of joy. I tell you, if it don't move it's gonna get smoked! Cheers.

We've got one of those, without the cold smoke adaptor. We built a cabinet for it at our old place:

Cold smoking salmon

It was a bit heath-robinson but made lovely smoked salmon and bacon. 

[Bright Raven]

Cool, that is just fab Dan! Brilliant video. Heath Robinson rules, I love ingenious solutions.
I will keep you posted on our smoking journey. My dad is a guitar maker and he uses lots of wonderful wood, it must be possible to compress some ourselves. Just think we could be eating bird's eye maple ribs and mahogany smoked trout. How about lignum vitae smoked soft cheese?

[SallyintNorth]

That's a great vid, Dan.  Hope the salmon was scrummy!  (I'm sure it was.)

I was interested in the compressed wood chip disks you were using.  Our local groundworks company produces a lot of wood shavings and sells big bags of them to horsey folk for £3 / bag.  He has now also got a machine to dry and compress them into those little disks, which he sells for a £3 a much smaller bag.  The dry matter content is the same in both bags, he says - as you would expect the compressed one takes up less space, huh.  We buy the odd compressed bag as the disks are brilliant at getting a fire going or recovering a dying fire.  (So is sawdust but the little disks are cleaner in the house.)

Seeing you taking the disks out of a little poly pack made me think to tell you about our local supplier in case you have a groundworks co near you who does the same - the guy near us does all the National Park / English Heritage etc footpaths, gates, etc., for a good few tens of miles around.

Unless of course you have to have food grade wood shavings for smoking food...?

[Dan]

It is quite expensive to buy the Bradley 'bisquettes' (their word, not mine!).

Works out about £1 per hour for smoking, so only worth doing for any length of time if you smoke a load of stuff at one time.

Not sure what the potential risk would be using your groundworks company's equivalent - this is what Bradley say about their's:

How does Bradley make the Flavour Bisquettes?

That's a secret. However we will tell you that the bisquettes are made with all natural products and the wood we use is clean and kiln dried and has not been used for some other purpose before we made it into a bisquette. Collagen is used to bind the wood chippings. The bisquettes are in all respects organic.

I suppose there's a risk of damaging the generator with moisture / resin / other impurities in the wood, and there's a health risk apparently - this isn't from Bradley:

If your wood has been cut down by a chain saw you’ll need to ensure any remaining oil residue from the chain saw’s automatic chain lube system has been removed. If this is not done you will effectively be smoking your produce in mineral oil. You may as well hang it behind the exhaust pipe of your car.

So for now we'll keep using the Bradley, but I've grand plans to build a brick bbq with a chimney and smoke chamber built in. Just need to finish everything else on the list first. 

[Bright Raven]

Thanks for the above, I will probably keep buying Bradley bricks until the funds run out and I have to start scamming up an alternative. I hadn't considered I could be courting a health risk. 

[SallyintNorth]

I have a friend who has an organic trout farm and sells the most delicious oak-smoked trout.

He was wanting the operation to be permaculture but food safety regs mean that the oak chippings have to be from a tree wholly processed for the purpose of food production, it may not be offcuts from the furniture industry for instance.  Barking mad.