The COVID-19 pandemic has hit northern BC (12 confirmed cases in the Northern Heath region as I’m writing this), and Stephen and I have been in voluntary self-isolation for 2 weeks. While I do enjoy working from home, it’s not an ideal situation when you’re stuck within the parameters of the house 24/7. We have gotten a little stir crazy.
To help us prepare for the COVID food-and-TP-shortage (and to add a little variety to the week), we decided to jar some wa̱n – deer that we had in the parents freezer. This will extend the shelf life of the meat, and in the event of a power outage or a freezer failure, we will have an alternative source of wa̱n.
Originally we set out to jar soup, deer soup specifically. But realized the process would be much more labour intensive to prepare and cook the soup, and then cook it again in the pressure cooker. Since this was our first time jarring deer, we decided it was best to simplify. Our recipe includes only deer, carrot, onion and some flavouring, but when we go to eat it, we can add ingredients to make it into a soup or stew.
We used the deer in the freezer that was a couple years old, to use up the old meat and prevent it from getting freezer burnt. We thawed 8 roasts and 3 shoulders – mind you these are Haida Gwaii deer which are smaller than the average mainland deer. The roasts were left out overnight on a couple cookie sheets. Steve processes/packages them pretty good, so they didn’t bleed out on the cookie sheet as they were thawing. We chopped up 4 large carrots and 3 small onions to add to the 12 jars.
We got our recipe from YouTuber Teach A Man to Fish (https://youtu.be/RNZ0MM5fESw). We used 1L jars, and filled the jar 1/2 way with 1” cubes of deer meat. We put a few slices of carrots and a 1/4 of an onion per jar (I’m not a huge fan of onions lately!). We added about 1/2 a teaspoon of Better than Bouillon, and filled the jar with filtered water, leaving 1” of room from the top of the jar.
We used this recipe for about 3 of the jars. For the other 9 jars, Steve did the same recipe noted above, but added 1/2 a teaspoon of rosemary, a few shakes of black pepper and a few shakes of garlic powder.
Pressure cooking starts off with sanitizing the jars, or “venting,” which involves boiling and steaming the jars unpressurized for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes of venting, the vent is closed and the burner is left on high until the canner is pressurized to 10lbs. Once the pressure cooker reached 10lbs, we turned the element down to medium heat (to keep the pressure steady at 10lbs), and we let the deer cook for 100 minutes.
Once the element is turned off, you have to wait for the pressure cooker to depressurize (for the dial to reach 0lbs) BEFORE opening the vent or taking the lid off. This is very important to slowly allow the pressure cooker to depressurize! You don’t want to cause an injury by drastically dropping the pressure in the cooker. You can also crack your jars by cooling them down too quickly.
Once the jars are out of the pressure cooker (be sure to use those jar-picker-upper tongs), we put a kitchen towel on top of the jars to help them cool slowly. Deer has a reputation of being game-y and lean, but as you can see on the side of the inta samiim wa̱n, the jarring process actually preserved the fat in the jars.
We taste tested the jarred deer and it turned out great. The rosemary flavour didn’t come through very much, and we think it’s because of the Better than Bouillon broth that came from the jarring process. Usually it takes several hours of stewing deer meat to get it this tender, and you have to time your vegetables accordingly. But the jarred deer meat is already tender when it comes out of the jar, so it’s a great option for making quick and tasty meals.
Steve made this dinner for us, and he said the broth looked really good – he just whisked it separately from the meat and added some corn starch to thicken the broth into a gravy. He boiled a potato and carrot separately, strained out the water and added it to the gravy. He also added frozen peas and the rest of the jarred meat back into the pan and the result was home made Campbell’s Chunky Soup – exactly what I had wanted to make in the first place! lol
S&L – March 29, 2020