Saturday, March 19, 2016

Canning chicken again

I canned chicken again this week, enough to last us a good long while.

20 pounds of canned chicken breast

This is 20 pounds of chicken breast, ready to store on the shelf downstairs. I was quite happy with the first batch of chicken I canned, and felt that it was worth doing some more.  It's handy to have pre-cooked, pre-chunked chicken ready to go into soup, burritos, or chicken salad.

And even if I don't immediately use the broth in the recipe with the chicken, it's good to substitute for some of the water when cooking rice.  I don't put any salt in with the chicken, so it's just water and the juice from the meat. It all gets used.

I also put 20 pounds of chicken breast in the freezer.  Why so much chicken at once?  I discovered Zaycon Fresh last fall.  They are a sort of cooperative meat supplier that is supposedly farm-to-consumer, cutting out many of the middle transportation steps that grocery store meat has to go through.  They also have really great prices.  This boneless, skinless, never frozen chicken breast was about 30 cents cheaper per pound than the normal prices at my local grocery store, and appears to be better quality.

They only sell by the case, which is why I had 40 pounds of chicken to deal with all at once, but this will probably last us at least 8 months or so.  I also bought a 16-pound case of (frozen) pork tenderloins in December, and they are so yummy.  Mmmm, pulled pork sandwiches from the crock pot. And I have a case of frozen pollock fillets coming in April.

It felt a little weird the first time I went to pick up an order, because you pull up to their truck and they give you a case of meat.  I mean... buying meat off a truck in a parking lot...  But both orders I've gotten have been really high quality and fresh.  No complaints at all so far.  If you have the freezer space or are a canner, I definitely recommend it.

Here's a link if you want to check it out.  Zaycon Fresh.  In the interest of full disclosure, if you sign up from that link and place an order, I will get a referral credit on my account.  But I really have been very happy with what I ordered!

1 comment:

Rachel said...

I've never heard of this... But am interested in learning more especially how 'local' this process is. But buying by the 'case', may not work for me. So maybe next winter we could go in together on some stuff. We'll see.