Given that we live in a time that easily accessible refrigeration is widely available, fresh meat can be shipped just about anywhere safely. Thus, the need for canned corn beef may seem less than urgent.
But it wasn’t that long ago that canning food was a necessity for freshness, particularly for members of the military who were overseas and needed shelf-stable food they could just open and eat. So while canned corn beef may not be as much of a necessity as it once was, that salty stuff still has lots of fans around the world. It has a cultural reach you may not even fully comprehend, at least not yet. Here’s the untold truth of canned corn beef. h/t DOC.
Corn beef hash and a couple over easy is a breakfast staple in my family.
My sister makes a dip using canned corned beef melted with swiss cheese. Looks horrible but absolutely delicious.
LOL, I confess that I have a few cans of corned beef in my prepper supply. The way things are going I may get to use them before the year is over.
I prefer Italian sausage in the can…
I Had a dozen cans of it as SHTF Bailout Food.
It’s not that bad except for the Snouts & Assholes mashed into the mix.
Now I use other things.
I have 5 cans in the pantry. I bought a new canned spam slicer on ebay that slices the hole can, opened of course, in one swing of its arm. I fry the slices up and make sandwiches sometimes adding cheese. Mom brought us kids up on it for a quick lunch. Nothing wrong with MRE food. You got a problem with that??
There are worse things than canned corned beef, Vienna sausages comes to mind. Canned corned beef hash is good though and I will eat it occasionally. And Dickinson pumpkins sounds vaguely obscene. There is a reason all these canned meats are called mystery meat.
Is this another spam scam?
Kcir, snouts and assholes LOL, yuck! We used to joke that chicken nuggets were made from chicken beaks and feet. And we probably don’t want to know what’s in McDonald’s McFibs.
geoff – Back in my day we just called ’em Chicken McNads…
Make Canned Meat Great Again.
So that’s where all the chicken gonads go, as small as they are. Nothing goes to waste, my dad told me when they slaughtered a pig on the farm when he was a kid they’d use everything but the squeal. I never had any of my grandmothers head cheese when I was growing up because she quit making it before I was born. All of the guts and offal from cows we slaughtered every fall on my uncles farm would be spilled out onto an old car hood and towed to the far end of the field for the coyotes and crows and other carrion to eat, they gotta eat too.
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, EGGS and SPAM! And you know that SPAM supposedly stands for specially processed animal matter.
Ok, on a subject THIS boring and about a shelf-stable military food, you KNOW I have to chime in.
That’s because, at the risk of raising Doc’s and other military men’s ire, as well as risking another Aaron Burr “Charms” explosion, I will confess to having spent decades involved in the production of military rations, or Meals, Ready to Eat.
The feeding program actually expanded quite a bit for region specific and sometimes cultrally specific and/or neutral rations so now there’s a lot more initals than just MRE, but to avoid insanity we will leave it to that for now.
Also,in my defense, all we put in the envelope is what the military TELLS us to put there. We feed the Canadians too, and those guys eat a LOT better than their American counterparts, or at least tastier, believe me.
Anyway, that video made a lot about canning with salt, which is the most primitive form of presevation as it preserves by water control, but it didn’t seem to have much to say about retorting. You can also control water by dehydration, but that means you either have to reydrate or eat some tough foods, so that’s less popular except in beans, rice, and Slim Jims. If you’re a home canner you’ve done something like this, where you use a pot of boiling water to heat a Mason jar of preserves so you can cool it rapidly and lid it, creating a vacuum and a hermetically sealed container that uses control of air to minimize bacterial growth. Home canning is imprecise and rather unscientific as you do not have an effective, reliable kill step so maybe your preserves are preserved, or maybe they are not.
Retorting is the next level of that.
You take a container, could bena can, a semi-rigid plastic bowl, a tube, or an envelope to name a few, and exclude air from it on a filling line after filling it with product. This can be done with steam, actual vacuum, or with inert gas replacement. The idea here is to give bacterial spores a hostile environment so they cannot “hatch” once you kill the vegetative bacteria. You can also acidity some foods to make it even more hostile to bacteria, such as applesauce, but not every food is amenable to this as not every food tastes good like this.
You then have a hermetically sealed container so no NEW bacteria can get in, in an anerobic environment with spore forming bacterial spores and live bacteria still in it. Some cannot survive the low oxygen, but there are anaerobic bacteria that are unbotheted by this as well.
So now you move to the kill step.
This is where the containers are put in what’s similar to a large pressure cooker, a retort, that typically uses steam under pressure with some means of circulation to allow for even distribution through the vessel, that superheats the product to kill vegitative and anaerobic bacteria by cooking the product in the hermetically sealed container. Pressure has to be tightly controlled as well to preserve container integrety throughout the process, as too little pressure will cause the seal to fail during the cooking, and too little could allow the process medium to Infiltrate the container.
Exhaustive studies are done on the racking methods and the container types to ensure heat distribution throughout not just the vessel but throughout the racks, and specific tests on the coldest parts of each product inside the containers are done to ensure everything is heated all the way through to kill.
There are rigid rules for this spelled out by USDA and FDA among others. Process instruments must be certified, you have 4 hours from kettle to cook, 2 hours from sealing to cook, a minimum temperature the sealed product must be at, how fast it gets to temperature, how long it STAYS at temperature above a proven minimum, even how it cools as cooling too slowly may allow thermophilic bacteria, which can survive as spores but only comes out in a very high temperature range for a long time, to come out and make the food taste bad. Acidified foods don’t require as high of temperatures, but only if you can demonstrate proper acidification. A post temperature is taken to ensure effective cooling, and the product can then last for years without spoiling if the container is intact and not left out in the sun.
There’s a LOT more to it than this, I’ve barely scratched the surface especially on record keeping and controls, but since no one read this far I’ll stop here and just say that this corned beef thing was just the beginning of food preservation.
It got a lot better, a lot more complicated, and quite a BIT safer from there
And some of it DOES taste good as well.
And once more, military men and women, take it up with the DLA if you don’t like your specific dinner.
We only do what the customer asks for.
And that sometimes isn’t the tastiest, at least not to ME…
Happy St. Patrick’s day y’all!☘️🇮🇪
Oh, and the election was rigged and stolen, the China virus was imported, and now the crooks are starting a war, as Democrats always do, to keep us in fear and under control. FJB
Weren’t MRE’s jokingly referred to as meals refused by Ethiopians by some people. I still remember all the K-rats and C-rats hidden in the back end of the food storage compartment on board the Kitty Hawk in case of an emergency when all the normal food supplies ran out, the one time I had to pull UNREP (underway replenishment) duty.
I’ve got a few cans of the stuff in my preps. The stuff has a forever shelf-life. I like corned-beef and hash. Spam saved Hawaiians during WWII. You see it everywhere at stores in Hawaii. Only drawback to the stuff is the sodium content.
@SNS — Did you work with food irradiation preservation? Cobalt-60 tunnels and the like?
There’s a guy on YT who opens up and eats military rations from wars past. WAY past, like WWI and the Boer war. At least I think he is still on YouTube; he may not be with us anymore.
Shitbama likes weiners in the can!
Oscar Meyer actually sold weiners in a can with a separate sack of sauce back in the old days according to an old vintage advertisement.
Uncle Al
MARCH 17, 2022 AT 9:37 AM
“@SNS — Did you work with food irradiation preservation? Cobalt-60 tunnels and the like?”
…no, the closest we got to that was a microwave pilot project (MATS) that they spent years on that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. It was discussed but there was ZERO customer demand for it even from government customers, it needs a large area and elaborate safety protocols, and the government started mandating an “IRRADIATED PRODUCT” sticker for products produced that way which killed it as far as public sales were concerned because it simply scared uninformed people off.
Probably for the best. Food processing jobs on the floor are not super sought after, so you’d end up with having this operated by the uneducated and non-English speakers who would probably expose someone in the room on purpose to the radiation source for a laugh.
It’s all we can do to get people to not fear the X-ray inspection machines.
It’s not the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of tho. The big thing is “Fresh, never frozen”, but not cooked to death either, and I’d need the whole Interwebs for all THOSE false starts, but high pressure processing was probably one of the dumber ones. We didn’t get into that but I knew of some who did. The theory was to use extreme pressures against hermetically sealed containers to “squash the bugs” as bacteria would die just as we would in tons of overpressure, so they’d load containers into big pressure vessels that are filled with water (which is uncompressable) and subject to pressures in excess of 80,000 psi. .
I personally would not like to stand outside of a vessel with water at 80,000 psi in it, especially after its got a few years on it and maybe hasn’t been all that well maintained or inspected, but that’s just me. It’s still in use in places but obviously the types of foods preserved and the types of containers you use are severely limited and your controls are expensive and you need to treat or throw away a fuckton of water, so it’s a niche market at best that really isn’t price competitive with simpler, more common processes and doesn’t really produce a superior product, which is why you probably never heard of it.
You have to keep it simple on the factory floor, and as safe as possible for all involved, not to mention be able to PROVE you are producing safe product.
Given the dangers, real and imagined, of radiation processing and the general lack of consumer acceptance, not to mention the safety issues you’d encounter if your control machinery malfunctioned and a guy that had to enter a room with an exposed pile to make it retract, the difficulty of obtaining and disposing of radioactive material, the reluctance of property owners (most industrial properties are leased) to deal with radiation, and the extra security you’d have to have in the era of dirty bombs, that’s probably a dog that will also only hunt in the nichiest of markets and so I would not be looking for that to ever be a major player in your supermarket or warehouse club.
geoff the aardvark
MARCH 17, 2022 AT 9:32 AM
“Weren’t MRE’s jokingly referred to as meals refused by Ethiopians by some people.”
Yep. They are largely formulated for caloric content and portability, and easiest isn’t always tastiest.
But they WILL keep you alive and healthy, and can fill you up.
I don’t know about any use in Ethiopia, there are less expensive ways to distribute food in environments like that, but MREs were given to enthusiastic folks in Somalia back when we got into THAT disaster, are distributed stateside sometimes during major events like hurricanes, and their similar, culturally neutral cousins Humanitarian Daily Rations have been kicked out of airplanes onto civilians in war zones all over the world, and most folks seem happy to get them.
I can’t promise they taste great. Again, that’s a function of what we’re told by the customer to put in the envelope.
But I CAN promise you that there are TONS of procedures to make sure they are safe, and I do everything in my power to make sure those that pass through MY machines remain that way.
Before we had a deep freezer my mom would can the most delicious large beef chunks in gravy. She was afraid to have a pressure canner so she boiled the jars for like 3 hrs. of something. It is no longer recommended by USDA canning literature, but she was not afraid to eat or serve it to her family. Somewhere I’ve got a 1940’s canning recipe book that tells how.
I must add as a canner myself–if you boil in a boiling water bath canner, many of the conventional canners are not deep enough and the water will actually boil down too low to make a good seal. They look ok while the water is churning but when you shut off the heat the level will be below the tops of the jars and within a week no seal ( I learned from experience, but I have not actually done meat yet. I use huge stainless stockpots if I want plenty of water on top. And the H2O needs replenished during the canning process. Canning is very precise so you start slowly with jam and work your way up.
Also I have pressure canned and it can be way easier once you learn how. I still have some fear though the new canners are somewhat better. But when the lid is stuck and you are told in the book you need to get the top off or else (all I can think is pressure cook explosion), a large screwdriver might be needed. These occurrances have made me pretty much strictly a water bath canner.
I’m also reminded of creamed dried beef on toast, the kind of beef sliced thin in packets and we know what that was called
So the avatars shape shift
The Argentina brand corned beef in a can is pretty good.
Actually creamed tuna in white sauce on toast was worse than SOS. My mom would make it every once in while and none of my 3 brothers and I ever liked it.
In Vietnam a can of Spam was like Prime Rib Roast when you compare it to Ham & Muthas!
S.nout
P.rick
A.sshole
M.ashed
My store has the Hereford Corned Beef
Doc, did you have a favored C-Rat meal?
My wife and I can a lot of moose and caribou. Works really good for rib cages. Saw the ribs into jar length sections, roll them up and stuff in a jar, fill any empty space with scrap meat from butchering and pressure can it. Delicious!! Just the thing for a fish or hunting camp.
We used to make corned moose brisket. Although it always came out good and not as salty as the commercial product, we haven’t made any for a few years.
Ox & Palm brand canned corned beef from New Zealand and Idaho Spuds and an onion and you have fresh made corned beef hash that travels w/o refrigeration. We use it camping and at rodeos and it is a fan favorite. Idaho Spuds reconstitute with water and they are pretty darn good hash browns. Both have been around forever.