Fresh Caught Albacore Tuna

Last week we got together for a bit of tuna canning. I've mentioned before that Washington has an amazing range of natural resources! We live about a half hour from Westport, a fishing town on the Pacific. This time of year, I put a call in to The Hustler, and wait. They call us when they are on their way back to port and bring us pounds of filleted tuna to can. This year I over-ordered, so Dorrie called our friend, Jennifer, and said, "Hey! Wanna learn how to can tuna?" Jennifer is a free-spirit and good-natured, so she agreed.

Here it is, fresh albacore in all its glory.

This is Dorrie modeling how we trim and cut the tuna into jar size chunks. Dorrie brings her own fancy knife with a sharpener built into its case. That is some serious canning strategy, right? She and I have canned tuna together for a while now, so we have this down to a precise routine. Jennifer fit right in to our routine and our jovial atmosphere. A lot of silliness and jokes ensue during tuna time. By about batch number five, our brains are mushy!

We fill the jars to 1 inch from the top with tuna. I'm modelling this fun and slimy step. Cutting and filling - the messy parts of the job. We put a 1/4 teaspoon of salt in each jar, burp them, wipe the rims with a damp, clean cloth, and move to the stove area for the next step - lids.

The lids have to be heated in order to soften the sealant, then we pick them out of the hot water with our fancy picker-upper tool, as Jen is modeling here. We place the lids on the jars, screw a band on each, and load them in the pressure canners. We run two canners - mine and Dorrie's, so that we can get more tuna done quicker. I've left out some critical warnings here. Please make sure you know what you are doing with your canner - Dorrie and I always joke about explosions, but we are always checking our direction booklets, too.

While the tuna is cooking, we wait. This involves snacking as Jen and Dorrie are modeling here, crossword puzzles, web searching (see the notebook?), laughing, and making new plans. Jen's latest idea is a video blog of cooking at other people's houses. I'm excited. Hopefully she'll come to our house first. I'd watch that. Pretty funny. Each batch of tuna has to be pressure cooked at 10 pounds of pressure for 1 hour and 40 minutes. That doesn't include the heat up and cool down times, so we had lots of time for camaraderie.

And here is our final product! Wonderful healthy jars of tuna. Canning tuna is a lot of work, but having friends to do it with makes it fun. The kids ran ragged together all day, which made our evenings easier since they were exhausted. Hopefully we'll have many more years of canning to come!