Canning Tuna - A How To

When you live near the coast, you can tuna. You head down to the docks, or talk to one of your fisherman friends (because there are a lot of fishermen here) and you buy a bunch of whole fish. Say, 100-200lbs of it. Then you fillet it. Then you can it.

Pretty simple.

You know where your food comes from (just miles off the coast) and you know how it was processed (at home.) It makes for much happier tuna consumption than the little cans of Bumblebee from the store. Plus, it would take about 5 of those cans to feed my family for lunch. Opening one can is just much easier than opening five. See? I am a tad bit lazy.

So here we go.......

Take your fillet of fish and remove the skin.

Make sure to first cut out all that really dark meat (the blackish, reddish, purplish stuff- it's really fishy.)
Now, if you're a professional fish cutter-upper than you have this down pat. If you're me though, you have some fillets that turn out beautifully...

and then others that just looked hacked to death. But it's o.k., "hacked to death" doesn't matter when you're just cramming the fish into the jar anyway.

Cut your tuna into 2" chunks and pack firmly into clean jars.

Add about 1/4-1/2tsp salt, wipe your rim down, place your lid on, screw on the band and load the jar into the pressure canner.

Your pressure canner should have a couple of inches of water in it, say 2".

Once your canner is full of jars, place the lid on and turn your burner on high. Once the air/steam starts to come out of the top little exhaust hole, turn on your timer for 10 minutes. Once you have allowed all the air to escape, place your bobber thingy (don't you love all my crafty, scientific names for things?) on the exhaust and bring your canner up to pressure. Can at 11lbs of pressure for 100 minutes for pint jars. When 100 minutes is up, simply turn your burner off and allow the canner to reduce it's pressure on it's own. DO NOT remove the bobber thingy until all pressure is gone!

The whole process of canning, once your jars are in the canner, takes about 2 hours with all the heating up and cooling down. I try to can as much as possible at one time so that I'm not at the stove all day long.

Really, canning tuna is easy and fun! Have you ever had home canned tuna? Questions? Comments? :)

This post is linked to the Barn Hop!