Did you know that 10 pounds of pressure is equal to 6.8 meters of depth in the ocean? The pressure used to can for my elevation is 10 lbs. So.... let's drown a bird. That sounds a bit morbid.....
I have 2 Presto 16 quart pressure canners** and have been using them for a few years now. I'm very comfortable pressure canning and usually get excellent results. I've never used the canners for anything else until now.
All over YouTube and bookface I kept seeing folks pressure cooking their entire frozen turkeys, using their pressure canners. Gotta try that! Since I didn't need to roast one, I thought this would be a good way to experiment with my 99 cents a pound bird that wouldn't thaw.
The frozen giblet bag is still inside the bird, you can see the plastic truss thingy is also still attached. That bird was frozen solid. I was able to get the wrapper off and that was it. I chunked up celery, onions, carrots, pepper and parsley and threw those in. I added water up to the maximum fill line inside the canner. I put the lid on and started the canner off at medium heat to warm things through. Once the canner was hot enough to burn to the touch, I upped the heat to medium high. Then I waited for the steam to roll. It took some time. Once the nipple popped up telling me the canner was full of hot steam, I added the weight and rolled on up to 10 lbs pressure. I backed the heat off a little bit until the weight was rocking correctly and then turned the heat down to medium low. The canner sounded different than the usual water boiling around hot jars inside of it.
Google said to p.c. 10 min per 1.5 pounds of bird. This one weighed 15.8 lbs. So I went with 90 minutes. It was fully cooked, it could have used 5 or 10 minutes more just to make it totally fall apart. I was very pleased. The breast meat in particular was so juicy and flavorful. I lifted the meat out of the canner with two long spoons and set it into a dishpan to cool for awhile. (I am an Amazon Affiliate. You can click this link to purchase the item I'm talking about. I might earn a small commission from that, which helps support this website.)
Once deboned, this bird yielded 4 quarts of well packed meat in broth. The carcass also made FIVE GALLONS of broth and I honestly think it could have made more but I was tired. More on that later.
This was such a simple process and so easy to do. If you have a bird that won't thaw, don't hesitate to try this! I will definitely be doing this again.
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