Pressure canning salmon

If you're interested in canning, at the bottom of this post is a summary of the process of canning.

I lucked into some local fresh silver salmon (coho salmon), gutted, but with head on, for $2.00/lb, provided I bought 50lbs, which ended up being 6 fish. I filleted them, but after thinking about it for a bit, decided that it was good quality fish and it'd be pretty tasty canned, so I canned the salmon.

I can my own fish because I like to know where my fish is coming from, and the ingredients, and because i can pack it to my own specifications, I know it'll taste better than what I can typically buy.

For canned fish I've settled on a half-pint wide-mouth jar as my preferred canning size. It's pretty close to what I typically consume in a day or two. I've done larger jars in the past, but I always ended up refrigerating the jar after I opened it for a week. Smaller jars work better for how I eat the fish.
You don't really have to fillet salmon to can it. Commercial canneries just hack the salmon into hunks, stuff it into a can, and the heat and cooking of the canning process softens the bones and makes them part of the salmon. I actually wanted to eat some of this salmon now, so I BBQ'd the backbones I removed and ate that as a snack. The fillets, with the skin on, are what I canned.

You can see a couple of bits of skin in these filled, raw jars. The skin on a salmon is where most of the fat on the fish is found, and is a source of many nutrients, so I like to can it with the skin on. But esthetically, the black isn't pleasing to the eye. So I cut the fillets into strips, roll them into O shapes, and stuff them into the jar so that the skin mostly doesn't show.

Here's a batch of half pint jars fresh out of the pressure canner.

Here's what the finished product looks like. It looks like a solid hunk of salmon in the bottom, and it is -- a rolled slice of a fillet. Canned properly, this will keep at room temperature for years. I usually eat it within 12 months of canning. As with other foods, the final step for me is to label this jar with the the date of canning and contents, as well as any notes about the recipe I used. 6 months from now, if I find a particularly tasty jar of salmon, I'd like to be reminded what was in it.

Canning process summary:

Only can the best quality ingredients. Fresh, and in season, for best results.

Meats and fish are low-acid foods, and must be pressure canned. This basically means you fill your cans, put the tops on them, and then put them in a pressure cooker for a specified period of time. For canned salmon, I pressured cooked them at 10lbs pressure for 100 minutes per the guidelines included in my pressure canner.

Canning recipes are pretty simple. Here's the recipe for this batch of salmon:

Fill jar with salmon, leaving 1/2" airspace at top of jar

Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to jar (flavor, aids in removing air pockets)

add 1/2 teaspoon salt to jar (flavor)

Examine jar and remove any air pockets
remove jar lid from boiling water bath and screw top on hand-tight.

Process according to instructions.

I use the All American Pressure canner Model 941, which I admit is a very large, pretty expensive pressure canner, for the following reasons:

1) When I do can, I'm typically dealing with a bulk purchase of some sort. In this case, 60lbs of salmon. So I want to be able to handle a large amount of food at once.

2) The processing time for pressure canned items is measured in hours. So by the time I get done with all the food prep and jar filling, I usually have time to do one batch per day. With this particular pressure canner I have the capacity to can 30 to 50lbs of meat at a time. So for this salmon, I was able to can it all in one shot. Big time saver for me.

3) Properly cared for, this canner will last the rest of my life, and probably my childrens and grandchildrens life. So yes, it looks expensive, but given its likely lifespan, it's not that much. Worth buying quality.