Vidéos YouTube C1: How It's Made: Canned Meat

With so much on their plates, busy people rely on shortcuts to help prepare meals.

Nowadays, you can stock your pantry with cans of precooked meat

so there's always something on hand to use in sandwiches, stews, stir-fries, and other tasty dishes.

This canned meat is meticulously hand-produced by a craft cannery and made in small batches.

It contains no artificial ingredients or preservatives, just meat and sea salt.

When a shipment of meat arrives at the cannery,

the quality control manager records its lot code for tracking purposes.

As a food-safety precaution, he confirms the temperature of the meat,

which must come in between zero to 39 degrees Fahrenheit.

A skilled butcher then inspects the meat and trims off the excess fat.

If it's a large piece, the butcher slices it into smaller pieces so that it can pass through the dicing machine.

The dicer cuts the meat into one-inch cubes.

At the filling station, aluminum cans circulate around a rotating table.

As one worker shovels cubed meat onto the center of the table,

others manually fill cans while simultaneously performing a quality inspection.

Workers will discard any cubes that are discolored or too fatty.

Next, technicians place a single cube of sea salt in each can filled with meat.

This is the only added ingredient.

At the next station, workers weigh each can individually

and either add or remove meat to reach the required weight.

The filled cans now travel on a conveyor belt to the cook room.

There, they enter the pre-heater, which blasts them with steam for 20 seconds.

This expels air that's trapped between the cubes of meat.

Next, the cans move into the closing machine.

The machine compresses the meat to provide sufficient clearance at the top of the can.

This head space creates a vacuum on the can to draw out the remaining air.

Then, a device attaches the lid by a process known as double seaming.

The process rolls the edges of the lid and can together,

forming a rim that provides an airtight seal.

It's time to get cooking.

A worker lowers the cans into a commercial-sized pressure cooker.

Cooking under steam pressure produces the tenderizing effects of slow cooking in a fraction of the time.

The meat cooks in its own juices.

The cooking temperature varies, depending on the type of meat and the can size.

When the meat is ready, the technician removes the cans and sets them aside for about an hour to cool and dry.

The cans are then moved to the packaging area.

As a worker loads the labeling machine, he inspects each can for dents or damaged seals.

One by one, the cans roll over a glue applicator,

then a stack of labels, wrapping themselves in the top seal.

At the same time, the machine counts the number of cans.

After rolling off the labeling machine, the cans pass through an ink-jet printer which applies the best-used-by date.

That date is next to the lot code, which the closing machine printed while attaching the lid.

This can of meat has a five-year shelf life, due to two crucial factors:

it is cooked properly and the can's seal is airtight.