Home canned mincemeat

This home-canned mincemeat is wonderfully rich and laden with spices. Nothing will say Christmas like this mincemeat.

And yes, it’s the real thing — with actual meat in it.

This recipe is expensive to make, and labour intensive to assemble, which makes it everything that a truly luxurious Christmas treat should be.

You can use it for large pies, or for tarts (aka mince pies in the UK), or anything that calls for mincemeat.

When you open a jar to use at a moment’s notice during the holiday season, don’t feel guilty about how easy that just was: you paid your dues in advance.

This recipe comes from the USDA Complete Guide (2105) and also appears in So Easy to Preserve (2014).

This recipe makes a LOT. Unless you have hordes of starving mouths coming through your door during the holidays, you may want to cut it in half.

A half-litre (1 pint) jar will make 8 to 12 tarts depending on the size of the tarts and how generous you are with the filling.

The recipe

Jar size choices: Half-litre (US pint / 16 oz) OR litre (US quart / 32 oz)

Processing method: Pressure canning only

Yield: 7 x litre (US quart) jars

Headspace: 3 cm (1 inch)

Processing pressure: 10 lbs (69 kPa) weighted gauge, 11 lbs (76 kpa) dial gauge (adjust pressure for your altitude when over 300 metres / 1000 feet.)

Processing time:  Half-litres or litres (pints or quarts) 90 minutes

If you don’t have a pressure canner, you can freeze this in plastic containers or straight-sided jars with no shoulders. (Water-bath canning is not acceptable for safety reasons.)

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Home canned mincemeat

7 x litre jars (US quart)

Course Dessert

Cuisine English

Keyword Beef, Pie Filling

Prep Time 1 hour hour 30 minutes minutes

Cook Time 3 hours hours 30 minutes minutes

Total Time 5 hours hours

Servings 7 litre jars (US quart)

Calories 2704kcal

Metric - US Customary

Ingredients

• 2.5 kg ground beef (OR 2 kg ground venison plus ½ kg sausage)
• 300 g suet (2 cups finely chopped, 10 oz)
• 3 kg apples (5 quarts chopped roughly, 6.5 lbs, measurements after prep)
• 1 kg raisins (dark seedless. 6 cups / 2 lbs)
• 500 g golden raisins (seedless. 3 cups / 1 lb)
• 2 litres apple cider (2 US quarts / 64 oz)
• 2 tablespoons cinnamon ground
• 2 teaspoons nutmeg nutmeg
• 1 kg sugar (white. 5 cups / 40 oz)
• 2 tablespoons salt OR non-bitter, non-clouding salt sub
• brandy extract (optional: ½ to 1 teaspoon per jar)

Metric - US Customary

Instructions

• Combine meat and suet in pot, cover with water, bring to a boil and simmer until the meat is cooked. (See recipe notes below).
• Drain water off meat (or scoop meat out of water with a mesh strainer.)
• Wash, peel, core and chop the apples, and measure.
• In a large pot or bowl, combine the meat and apple.
• Put the meat mixture through a food grinder using a medium blade. (See recipe notes below).
• Put ground meat mixture in a pot at least 12 litres (quarts) in size.
• Add all remaining ingredients.
• Bring to a boil uncovered, stirring frequently.
• Lower to a simmer and let simmer uncovered for about an hour, to thicken it slightly.
• Stir frequently to prevent scorching.
• Ladle hot mixture into hot ½ litre or litre (1 US pint or quart) jars, leaving 3 cm (1 inch) headspace.
• Debubble; adjust headspace.
• Wipe jar rims.
• Put lids on.
• Processing pressure: 10 lbs (69 kPa) weighted gauge, 11 lbs (76 kpa) dial gauge (adjust pressure for your altitude when over 300 metres / 1000 feet.)
• Processing time: Process either size of jar for 90 minutes .

Nutrition

Serving: 1g | Calories: 2704kcal | Carbohydrates: 379.7g | Protein: 58.8g | Fat: 116.6g | Saturated Fat: 39.6g | Cholesterol: 278mg | Sodium: 2265mg | Fiber: 11.7g | Sugar: 312.5g

See also: Dial-gauge pressures, if applicable for your canner.

Reference information

How to pressure can.

When pressure canning, you must adjust the pressure for your altitude.

For salt substitute, Herbamare Sodium-Free was used.

For stevia, Better Stevia liquid stevia was the stevia used.

Click through if you’re interested in the story of mincemeat from a culinary, non-canning point of view.

Recipe notes

• This is an unusual recipe in that usually there’s a prohibition on adding fat to canning recipes. This one calls for a very large amount to be added;
• To cook the ground meat you can boil it. To save energy, we used a Presto 16 quart canner as a pressure cooker, using 2 cups of water and giving the ground meat 10 minutes at 10 lbs., with natural release. You don’t want to fry it: wrong texture, wrong taste;
• TIP! Save the cooking water from the meat for stock. Put in fridge, and skim the fat off the next day;
• You want roughly 3.5 kg (8 lbs.) of apples to start with, that’s about 30 medium-sized (125 g) apples;
• It doesn’t matter if the apples are firm pie quality or not; even soft eating apples are fine as they will all be ground up, anyway;
• It doesn’t matter if you are a tidge over or under on the apples;
• The apple cider meant is the non-alcoholic North American kind that is like a cloudy, unfiltered apple juice. Use unsweetened if possible, as the recipe will be plenty sweet enough anyway;
•  Instead of the sugar, you could use 6 teaspoons liquid stevia. If using liquid stevia, add an extra cup (250 ml / 8 oz.) of apple cider to make up for lost volume from sugar;
• If you own a heat diffuser, you may want to use it while simmering the mixture, as it will stick, and this is too expensive to scorch;
• Use a 12 litre (12 US quart) pot or larger. A 16-quart Presto canner (used without the lid) makes an ideal simmering pot;
• The mixture will start off pale grey but will darken a great deal during the simmering and be very dark at the end of processing;
• When you are bottling the pie filling, if you see dark stuff stuck to the bottom of the pot, don’t assume it’s necessarily scorch. It could just be dissolved rich raisin solids built up on the bottom of the pot. Taste to see. If that is the case for you, stir it back in;
• No, the spicing they call for is not too much: it is just right, so don’t skimp. Nor is the salt (or salt sub) too much in terms of taste;
• It does thicken up somewhat during the simmering phase, and again after cooling in the jars after processing, so don’t worry about it being too runny for pies or simmering it for hours trying to get it thicker;
• Instead of golden raisins, you could just use all dark raisins: the golden raisins end up being as dark as anything else in the mixture and indiscernible, so maybe they wanted them for a different taste (also see history notes below);
• The jars may vent a bit, so do take the build-up of pressure, and the cool-down, of the pressure canner nice and steady so as not to exacerbate that through sudden pressure changes;
• You may want to leave a bit more headspace even than the 1 inch, perhaps an extra quarter inch;
• Allow about 5 to 6 hours in total from start to taking the jars out of the canner, even with an apple peeling machine.

For the grinding, what they mean is passing it through a meat grinder attachment such as the one shown below. If you don’t have a meat grinder, try pulse on a food processor.

Your ground mixture will look like this before you start cooking with it. Don’t despair about the grey. The colour will deepen greatly on its own.

Recipe source

Mincemeat Pie Filling. In: Andress, Elizabeth L. and Judy A. Harrison. So Easy to Preserve (SETP). University of Georgia Cooperative Extension. Bulletin 989. Sixth Edition. 2014. Page 110.

Festive Mincemeat Pie Filling. In: United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Complete guide to home canning. Agriculture information bulletin No. 539. 2015. Page 2-28.

Note: The USDA Complete version calls for 4 lbs ground beef OR (4 lbs of ground venison and 1 lb. sausage thus totalling 5 pounds.) So Easy to Preserve reads: 5 lbs ground beef OR (4 lbs of ground venison and 1 lb sausage.) We went with the measurements from So Easy to Preserve.

Modifications made:

• Suggested sugar and salt-free option;
• Suggested brandy extract option.

History

Mincemeat was first born in Elizabethan times. At that time in history, medieval cooking styles and tastes still lingered, with blurred lines between savoury and sweet. In a meat pie, you might put lots of fruit.

Mincemeat pies were banned during Puritan times, as they had traditionally been made in the shape of a manger (the Puritans didn’t like any symbols they considered associated with the Roman church.) When the pies reappeared after the Puritans, the pies took the round form they now still have.

This USDA recipe used here is perhaps more similar to an old Heinz commercial version than it might be to a British farmhouse version, with copious amounts of alcohol.

In 1877, the Heinz company started selling prepared mincemeat, available in wooden buckets, stone crocks or glass jars. ‘Many recipes of the time called for rum, but Heinz used cider vinegar. Heinz also added candied citron to the recipe… A published Heinz recipe called for ‘fresh meat selected from the country’s best output; rich, white suet; large, juicy, faultless apples; Four-Crown Valencia confection raisins, carefully seeded; plump Grecian currants of exceptional flavor, each one thoroughly cleansed and purified; rich candied citron, orange and lemon peels.’ Up until the late 1800s, the recipe still contained minced beef. Mrs Beeton’s recipes for mincemeat do. ^[1]Skrabec, Quentin R. H.J. Heinz: A Biography. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009. pp 73 – 74.

Like the Heinz version, the USDA version keeps the actual meat and suet, uses apples, two different types of raisins (golden and dark), and uses apple cider (though in vinegar form) instead of alcohol.

Heinz’s combination of two different types of raisins would have increased the appeal to housewives over making their own, as raisins were very expensive, and, after you bought them, you had to seed them yourself — one by one.

Cooking with canning

Mincemeat tarts (aka mincemeat pies)

Nutrition

Since you are adding fat in anyway, does it matter if you use regular or a lean ground beef? Turns out, it still does. Your lowest-cal version is the “Sugar and salt-free with extra-lean ground beef”, in which the calories are reduced essentially to half.

Regular with medium ground beef

Per 1 litre / quart jar with 70% lean / 30% fat

• 2704 calories, 2265 mg sodium

Regular with extra-lean ground beef

Per 1 litre / quart jar with 95% lean / 5 % fat

• 2004 calories, 2261 mg sodium

Sugar and salt-free with medium ground beef

Per 1 litre / quart jar with 70% lean / 30% fat

• 2168 calories, 273 mg sodium

Sugar and salt-free with extra-lean ground beef

Per 1 litre / quart jar with 95% lean / 5 % fat

• 1468 calories, 269 mg sodium