Canned Beef

Canned beef is cooked meat with its own broth, sealed and good for 5 to 10 years stored cool. It's the protein that turns the buckets of rice and beans into dinner, and the one that makes a long outage feel like meals rather than rations. There are several things sold under the name, and they are not interchangeable.

Chunk beef in broth, the plain cooked beef in a can, is the most useful: it goes into anything. Corned beef is salt-cured and dense, a different flavor, good for hash. Roast beef with gravy and beef stew are meals in a can, convenient and lower in meat per ounce. Home-canned beef, pressure-canned in jars, is the cheapest per pound if you have the canner. Read the meat content on the label; the price per ounce of beef is the real comparison.

Cool, dry, dark and off the floor, between 50 and 70°F if you can manage it; twenty degrees cooler, 70 down to 50°F, roughly doubles how long the contents stay at full quality. Never let cans freeze (the seams can fail) and never store them over a furnace, in a garage or in a vehicle. Rotate first in, first out, with the buy date written on the lid. A dented can is fine if the dent is small and not on a seam; a deep dent, a dent on a seam, rust that pits the metal, or any bulge means the can goes unopened.

Look before you open: bulging ends, a leak, rust that has eaten into the metal, or a seam dent. Listen and look as you open: spurting liquid, a hiss outward, cloudy liquid where it should be clear, foam, or a foul smell. Any of those and the whole can goes, unopened if possible, into the trash where nothing can get at it, because the thing you are guarding against is botulism, which has no taste and no cure outside a hospital. A can past its date with a sound seal and a clean smell on opening is food.

The fat in canned beef sets white and the broth jells when cold; both are normal and melt when heated.

A 12 ounce can of chunk beef is about 70 grams of protein and feeds a family in a pot of rice, a stew with canned vegetables, tacos with the tortillas, or chili with the beans and tomatoes. Use the broth; it's the flavor. One can per family meal, three or four meals a week, is a rotation that keeps a case moving and a year's worth is about 150 cans. The canned meat and fish page has the rest of the shelf.

Fully cooked and safe cold, better heated for ten minutes on a camp stove with whatever else is in the pot.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.