Jim,
Storing meat long term has been a problem for me for several reasons, but I think I have a pretty good solution. I recently started canning it myself. I bought a 25-quart pressure canner and a few dozen jars just as an experiment and tried it a few months ago and was amazed at how easy it is. Canning is not that much more trouble than freezing (assuming you re-cut and re-wrap meat before you freeze it). I still freeze steaks and fish, but I pretty much can everything else, from left-over turkey to hamburger meat.
You can cook up about 20 pounds of stew meat or hamburger at a time, can it, and then use it for a variety of things throughout the month. The effort required is not as much as I feared and the quality of the product is excellent. For making stews, soup, or basically anything of that sort, it’s indistinguishable from fresh meat and much more convenient. Almost every recipe you prepare starts with “brown the meat”. Your canned meat is already past that stage, so you can skip that step. I find myself grabbing a jar in preference to frozen meat just for the convenience.
It takes about 3 hours per “run” with my pressure canner, but most of this is spent reading or watching television or something. I start with the least expensive lean meat I can find, already cut into stew by the butcher, so my prep time is roughly 30 minutes. By the time the canner is up to the boiling point and ready to close, I have pre-cooked the beef and stuffed it into jars. Then, I wait 90 minutes, turn off the canner and wait another 20 minutes for it to cool and remove the jars. I find that I can do 2 runs after work in the evening while I am relaxing and by bed time, I have about 40 jars of meat sitting in my pantry. Since I can twice a month and use less than a jar a day, my stocks are building up quickly.
Canning saves freezer space and the meat doesn’t end up freezer burned in a month. In fact, I just opened a four month old jar of stew-beef and I didn’t notice any change in quality yet. I assume a year shelf life is about the most I can expect, but with rotation, that could allow me to store a year supply of meat with little trouble.
I first started with pint jars, but found that they are too large for me. I switched to 12 oz jars which were still a little big, and finally settled on 8 oz jelly jars as the optimum size for me. Figure about 4-8oz of meat per meal per person. Canned meat has already cooked down so you use less than you would if it’s fresh. . A pint jar should be about right to cook a meal for 4 people.
The price of home canned meat is roughly half the price of store bought product once you own the jars. (All jars cost a little under a dollar each in my area). The lids are maybe 10 cents each. I can’t vouch for shelf life yet, but the quality is at least as good. It’s a great feeling to see rows and rows of tasty and wholesome canned meat in the pantry.
BTW, I have also started storing my beans, lentils and other legumes in quart mason jars. Each one holds about 1.5 pounds. Just fill them up and drop in an oxygen absorber and you are done. – JIR