I Canned Chicken In My Instant Pot Max

I have canned for years, but I’ve always canned foods that you could water bath can. If it involved a pressure cooker I was not interested. I guess I’ve always felt leery of using one.

Well, I’ve been using my Instant Pot for sometime now, I’m very comfortable with it and I ended up recently purchasing an Instant Pot Max that has a canning setting and I thought, why not?

You shouldn’t pressure can in a regular instant pot you can only water bath can, you can’t watch the temperatures on a regular instant pot. You should only use the Max for pressure canning. Pressure canned foods need to maintain a certain temp for a certain time to kill spores, and you can monitor it on the Max

Here is a step by step on how I canned chicken breast:

I started with sterilizing my jars. You only have room to can four pint jars in the Max at one time.

To sterilize, I placed the jars into the instant pot on top of the metal rack. I poured water in around the jars to cover about 1/4th of the way up the jars.

I set the instant pot on canning for 10 minutes on low pressure and natural release. This sanitized the jars. Meanwhile, I simmered the lids and rings on the stove.

Once the jars were sterile, I removed them with a canning jar lifter and set them on a towel and let them cool down.

Once cooled, I packed fresh, raw chicken into the jars. I only packed chicken, no liquid, no seasoning, the meat makes its own juice as it cooks.

I wiped the tops of the jars with a clean cloth, then placed the lids and rings on. (Don’t crank down on the rings.)

Time to can. I placed the filled jars onto the rack in the instant pot max and made sure the water level was 1/4 way up the jars.

I noticed after I took this picture that my temperature setting was on Celsius. I’d set it to Fahrenheit afterwards. Press the canning setting, max pressure, no vent, natural release, and time needs to be 75 minutes or 1 hour and 15 minutes. I hit start and let it do it’s thing.

Once the Max had naturally released, We removed the hot jars and place on a towel and let cool. The lids popped as soon as we removed them.

They turned out so nice! Look at all the natural juice that each jar made. I could use this in some chicken chili or noodle soup, or even in a casserole dish.

I’ve been wanting to try this and now I’m going to try some different foods. It was very easy and rewarding.