Canning Sausage

My DH loves the way meat is tender and not grisly after it has been canned. He loves stew meat, hamburger, chicken ans sausage. I bought some sausage on sale this week. We usually make our own sausage but have not found a good sale on pork butt or shoulder recently, so I bought a good brand on sale. Also, our daughters are no longer raising swine for 4-H, so no pork in the freezer.

I made the sausage into patties and partially cooked them in the oven. I wanted to cook them in the oven because pan frying tends to give the meat a "case hardened" texture and taste. The patties didn't shrink up as much as when I pan fry them, so I trimmed them with a biscuit cutter to fit the jars, and then put all the scraps in a jar and canned those as well.Then put them in pint and 1/2 pint jars and pressure canned them for 1 hour 15 minutes at 15# pressure (for our altitude). I also canned up 2 jars of pepperoni and threw those in the canner with the sausage. To do this, I just took packaged pepperoni, layered it in regular 1/2 pint jars and sealed.It cans up wonderfully, although it shrinks down a lot, and it is great on pizza.