Canning Sausage Patties

It was brought to my attention that the Ball Blue Book states that you can put up sausage in patties by one of my followers on Facebook. I did some reading and it wasn't clear what the thickness of the patty was suppose to be.  The book say:

"Shape ground pork in to patties or 3 to 4 inch links. Cook until lightly browned. Drain. Pack hot sausage into hot jars, leaving 1-inch headspace. Ladle hot broth over sausage, leaving 1-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles. Adjust two-piece caps. Process pints 1 hour and 15 minutes, quarts 1 hour and 30 minutes, at 10 pounds pressure in a pressure canner."

So I decided that I would measure the best I could by flattening as I cooked them. Now some of you will not use homemade sausage to do this and it will make a difference in the amount of grease/fat that will remain once you have finished pressure canning. The sausage I used was Breakfast Sausage and the recipe is on this site here. I had packaged some in the freezer that wasn't in links to make patties later on. Thawing them and making this recipe was the perfect solution to getting the packages out of the freezer to make room for other things.
Here are the complete directions for making these sausage. Enjoy!

Canning Breakfast Sausage Patties

1. Shape sausage into patties roughly. Take a pint size wide mouth jar and shape the patty on a cutting board. Remove excess sausage meat and continue to shape all the patties. Try to keep your patties on the thinner side. Mine were all about 1/4" to 1/2" thick. If you are using store bought sausage meat you will have some decrease in size due to high amounts of fat content while you are frying them. That will be fine but don't be surprised when it happens.







2. Fry the meat and cook them on both side till they are golden brown. If they don't cook all the way through that is also fine since the pressure canner will cook them the rest of the way.







3. Drain the patties and remove as much of the fat as you can by laying them on a paper towel.

4. Stack patties in hot pint jars. I got 4-5 patties in the jars so you may gauge how many jars you will need based on the total patties. Do not fill the patties up beyond the 1" headspace.

5. Fill jars with hot water to 1" headspace. Using a rubber or plastic spatula remove air bubbles and refill to 1" if necessary. Using a paper towel that has vinegar on it, wipe the rims of the jars to remove any grease or debris so that you will get a tight seal when you add your lids.

6. Add hot lid (sitting in previously boiled water) and ring and tighten "finger tight". Place in pressure canner.

7. Process pints in pressure canner at 10lbs of pressure for a weighted gauge canner and 11lbs for a dial gauge for 75 minutes, quarts for 90 minutes.

When you remove them from the canner the broth will still be boiling inside of the jars. Once they cool they will have a ring of fat at the top from the fat/grease. As long as the fat isn't thick on top and usually will only be around the ring on the outside the jars are fine.

Labeling: Make sure to label your jars after they have cooled with the name of the recipe and the date canned.