The week of Thanksgiving, Greg typically takes off from work and focuses on harvesting turkeys and a few canning projects. This year, he processed 31 turkeys for customers, our 13 turkeys that we kept for ourselves, canned four different bulk bags of beans (pinto, kidney, white and black), made and canned 20 gallons of chili, and made (3) 50-gallon batches of bone broth (elk x 1 and poultry x 2).
The week takes a lot of prep and scheduling. A lot of ingredients need to be purchased for turkey brining, chili and broth. Turkeys need to be brined before they are broken down and frozen. Meat for chili needs to be removed from our freezer and properly thawed before being cooked. Chili beans need to soak before canned, then made into chili.
Each year we do this, we keep notes of what worked and what we should have done differently. It sounds crazy, but this is no vacation. Greg gets less sleep this week off of work than a normal week (which is less than 6 hours a night). Things are brining, cooking and canning simultaneously, so there are a lot of moving parts.
I don’t want to completely bore the heck out of you, so we will just briefly cover the main projects we did.
DEALING WITH 13 TURKEYS AFTER THE VOLUNTEER CREW LEFT
After the turkey harvest, we were left with 13 birds for ourselves to keep. We brined them for 2-3 days. Then we cut the breasts off and froze those individually. On average one breast weighed seven pounds. We cut off the legs and thighs together and then separated them again. We froze 2 legs in a bag together and thighs separately in individual bags. The wings were removed and packaged 3 to a bag. The reason we packaged the legs and wings was because it is very difficult to pull uncooked meat off that portion of the bird. We removed the rest of the meat from the carcass and included it with sacrificed breasts and thighs for a large batch of premium ground turkey. We sealed it in two-pound packages. After all, was done, we had a freezer with 370 pounds of pure turkey in it. That is equivalent to about ¾ of a cow. We kept the turkey carcasses for poultry bone broth.
BEANS
We had to soak beans for 24 hours. Again, we did pinto beans, kidney beans, white beans, and black beans. After that, we pressure canned them, labeled them and put them on the shelf. This yielded about 3-½ quart cases of each kind of bean.
CHILI
We took some of the kidney beans, pinto beans and white beans that had just been canned and added our own tomato sauce and paste that we had made over the summer. We added veggies and seasonings along with our own ground beef and pork. Once all combined, it simmered for a day in a 25-gallon pot. It then required another day to can it all. We ended up with about 160 pints of chili.
BROTH
The first batch of bone broth was with over 100 lbs of elk carcass. The second batch was made with over 100 lbs of fresh turkey carcasses, old hens, roosters, and parts of turkeys like necks and gizzards. The third batch was made with well over 100 lbs of turkey and chicken legs and heads. We had enough to do 3 more 50-gallon batches of broth using beef, pork, and lamb, but we have to draw the line somewhere. All batches had seasoning, salt, and apple cider vinegar along with 90 large carrots, 90 stalks of celery and 45 onions. Each batch simmered for about 1-3 days before being pressure canned. We yielded about 375 quarts of broth. This is the stuff that will cure what ails you and also tastes delicious!
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