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Spoon meat

Five half pint cases of plain pack

Nice work John. I'm sure your clan will enjoy popping the tops off those.
All fresh kings or cleaning out last years fish to make way for new stuff?

All fresh kings

Gonna smoke last years

I'm just a little jealous.

Man, you really suck

Canning up the my last catch of an Endangered Species would bring tears to my eyes.

Does anyone use cans anymore? I have a can sealer and a crap load of cans but no salmon.
It might as well go down the road.

Too expensive. Non-reusable. Of course, when the jars never come back from the kids, the non-reusable aspect becomes null..........

I also have a pile of new jars but I also have a vacuum chamber sealer.....WTH?.......redundancy

Jars are obsolete... retort bags rarely break, can be stuffed in the cooker nice and tight. You can get more than twice the fish in each load. The bags are sort of pricey (50 cents each) but all the other advantages make up for it.

I've never used retort bags, except on the eating side of the equation. Maybe I'll have to try it.......

I’ve been thinking of trying them but haven’t researched them yet.
Do you know if a vp115 will seal them properly?…………

This should make you feel better as we hit them again last night.

These are destined for the smoker.

I'll look into em.....I don't process all that many fish anymore but I'm always searching for the better method.

I'm more interested in making homemade MREs for hunting and scouting trips than using the bags for fish.

I do huge batches of bear "chili-bearde" in the bags and it really works well. Especially since bear goes bad quickly in the freezer.

There are some basic concerns you need to address to make things easy which most folks do not realize.

Thanks for piquing my interest. I'll be looking in to this. I suspect I'll have questions, so expect me to resurrect this exchange to pick your brain.

Well, that didn't take long. The internet, properly utilized, is a wonderful tool. I quickly found the following website using keywords that included the model of my Vacmaster 215:

https://diypreparedness.net/make-your-own-mres-with-retort-canning/

This one even featured a pic of a pressure cooker that looks exactly like mine, too. I found a few links to the Alaska Outdoors Forum, but they focused on preserving salmon more than meals ready to eat. It all looks pretty much like I would imagine as a veteran fish canner. As an MRE eater since their invention (I was a C-ration eater on active Army duty), I suspected that some meal types would be better in retort pouches than others. Like you posted about your bear chili, stews/cassarole type meals featuring diced meats would probably work best, especially for a novice with retort pouches like me. I'm mostly interested in bivouac meals, not base camp meals.

Can you comment on this website? Any other advice or tips?

Thanks in advance.