How to Prepare and Can Chicken at Home (Safely)

Chicken is a low-acid food, which puts it in the same category as green beans and corn: the category where Clostridium botulinum can grow in a sealed jar if you don't process it correctly. That's not a reason to avoid canning chicken. It's a reason to skip the water bath canner entirely and use a pressure canner, because that's the only tool that reaches the 240°F needed to destroy botulism spores. If you've only ever done water bath canning for jams and pickles, this is a different process with different equipment, and the stakes are higher.

The payoff is worth the extra care. A shelf-stable jar of cooked chicken means dinner is ready before you've even opened the pantry door. Chicken and rice, chicken salad, a quick soup base. Anyone who has raised meat birds or found a stack of bone-in thighs on sale knows the appeal of turning a big batch into a year's worth of quick meals.

What you need

A pressure canner, not a pressure cooker and not an Instant Pot. You need one large enough to hold your jars with the lid sealed and a gauge you can verify for accuracy (many extension offices will test dial gauges for free). Beyond that: quart or pint mason jars, new lids, a jar lifter, and boneless or bone-in chicken, fresh or thawed, trimmed of excess fat.

Skip the excess fat trimming step and you'll end up with cloudy jars and sealing problems, since fat interferes with the seal forming properly on the rim.

Raw pack vs. hot pack

Raw pack is the simpler of the two methods. Cut the chicken into pieces sized to fit your jar, pack them in loosely, leave 1¼ inches of headspace, and add a teaspoon of salt per quart if you want it (salt is for flavor, not safety, so it's optional). Don't add water or broth. The meat releases its own juices during processing, and raw pack actually produces a better texture than most people expect.

Hot pack means partially cooking the chicken first, boiling, steaming, or baking it until it's about two-thirds done, then packing it hot into the jars with the same headspace and optional salt. Hot pack shrinks the meat before it goes in the jar, so you can usually fit more per jar, and some people prefer the texture. Both methods are equally safe when processed correctly. This comes down to preference, not a food safety tradeoff.

Either way, wipe the jar rims clean before adding lids. A stray bit of fat or meat on the rim is the most common reason a jar fails to seal.

Processing times and pressure

This is the part where you follow the numbers exactly, not the part to improvise on. Processing time depends on jar size and whether the chicken has bones in it. Pressure depends on your altitude and whether your canner has a dial gauge or a weighted gauge.

For pressure, weighted-gauge canners run at a flat 15 PSI above 1,000 feet elevation and 10 PSI at sea level up to 1,000 feet, since a weighted gauge only comes in fixed increments. Dial-gauge canners scale more finely: 10 PSI from sea level to 1,000 feet, 11 PSI up to 2,000 feet, 12 PSI up to 4,000 feet, 13 PSI up to 6,000 feet, and 14 PSI up to 8,000 feet. Look up your actual elevation before you start. Guessing "close enough" on altitude is how under-processed jars happen.

Once the timer starts, don't touch the pressure. Let the canner return to zero PSI naturally after processing before you open it. Venting it early to speed things up is a shortcut that can cause liquid to siphon out of the jars and compromise the seal.

After the canner

Let jars cool undisturbed for 12 to 24 hours, then check the seals. A properly sealed lid won't flex when you press the center. Anything that didn't seal goes in the fridge to eat within a few days, not back in the canner. Label the sealed jars with the date and use them within a year for the best quality, though a correctly processed jar stays safe well beyond that.

One more habit worth building: before you eat from any jar, even one that sealed properly and looks fine, boil the contents for 10 minutes. It's a small step that adds real protection against the rare failure that isn't visible from the outside.

Sources: National Center for Home Food Preservation, Chicken or Rabbit; Complete Guide to Home Canning, Guide 5