So we have had a busy weekend with the pressure canner and last night we decided that we would try pressure cooking a turkey in it.
(We actually won this turkey and a whole pile of other things.)
Before this, we always roasted the turkey in the traditional way, but at Christmas, our local grocery store had a sale on turkeys. If you spend $100 you get $10 off the price of a turkey. They also give you a ballot to fill out with every sale and it enters you into a draw for The Twelve Days of Christmas where they give things away for twelve days up until Christmas.
We Won!
(I know it's fuzzy, but you get the idea.)
We were pretty stoked about that, and we had already put the turkey we bought in the oven, so this one went into the freezer.
Until last night.
We decided that we were going to make a bunch of jars of turkey soup and whip up a bunch of cat food with the greasy dark meat and giblets, so we put the rack in the canner and dropped in the mostly frozen bird. We didn't feel like going through the roasting process to just pack it into jars.
This was after 90 minutes at 12-15 lbs of pressure.
(Gerri sprinkled a nice mixture of spices on it before it went in.)
We then had to split up the bird. Luckily the meat fell apart like Britney in 2007.
(Our kids rarely eat, so a whole turkey is too much for us.)
The spices had beautifully infused throughout the meat and it was tender and moist. Kind of like Kevin James.
We had a very nice amount of broth in the pot, so Gerri cooked it down to add to our jars of soup.
(The layers are from the bottom: turkey, spinach, onion, celery, green beans, carrots, butternut squash, and sweet potato.)
We made eight jars up but "forgot" that the canner only holds seven quarts.
(That's a nice haul right there.)
We took the last jar and threw it in the pot with some leftover corn and beans. It was pretty impressive.
(I'm a big fan of homemade soup.)
And this is what we ended up with when we opened the canner.
(Sorry, kitties. This is our stuff.)
All in all, we liked this method of doing the turkey up. It was fast and delicious, and if we had put some onions and other herbs in the pot with the bird I think it would have been that much better. We don't eat enough to roast up a turkey dinner, so this works out perfect for us.
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.