Keystone Meats makes canned ground beef, ready to heat and serve, and the cans have a five-year best-by date. On the surface, this seems like a great item for preppers to add to their pantry. The question is, of course, how good is the product?
First, a disclaimer
This is a very unusual article for 3BY based on the fact that Spice and I generally don’t eat meat that we don’t kill and process ourselves (or from a trusted private source who raises his animals and processes them in a way we know and approve of).
In other words, in general, if it’s commercially processed beef, pork, chicken, turkey, etc. like you would see at a store or restaurant, Spice and I won’t order or buy it, and we won’t eat it.
One of these days I will probably talk about why, but for now let’s just say one of the many reasons is that my first job while in high school was at a meat packing plant that made hot dogs and lunch meats and leave it at that.
This can showed up by accident. I was reading about it on Amazon, and I must have clicked somehow on the buy it button because a 24-ounce can showed up.
I asked Spice what we should do with it, since it was already here. Due to the shipping cost it was pointless to return it, so our options were basically give it away for a Christmas food drive, feed it to our neighborhood cats who live under our back porch or eat it ourselves.
Spice said “Well, it’s here; that’s a sunk cost. Let’s eat it and at least get an article out of it.”
So, we did.
Here’s where the disclaimer comes in, though… please keep in mind that this is the first ground beef we’ve eaten like this in a couple of decades. We have had ground pork from free-range hogs prepared by a friend (see above) but, honestly, we have no idea how this compares to what you would get if you were to buy a pound of burger at the store and set them side-by-side.
Keystone Canned Ground Beef
The product was purchased on Amazon at a cost of $6.22 shipped, and it contains 28 ounces of fully cooked beef product inside the can.
I’m going to turn the rest of this over to Spice, because she opened the can and cooked the product.
First impressions
Not appealing. I’m not sure why I expected them to have skimmed off the worst of the fat (perhaps because that’s what I used to do). They didn’t do that, and it was about half a cup of solid fat when I removed it. Of course it rises to the top and solidifies in the cold, but logic doesn’t make it look any better.
Upon opening the can, the ground beef looks far from appetizing… unless you really, really like to eat suet.
Preparation
I poured off the 3/4 of a cup of liquid first. It will go into a soup this week. Then a butterknife let me lift off most of the fat, about 1/2 a cup of it. That got fed to the cats; although of course beef lard can be used for everything from bread spread if you’re short on calories to frying fat to fish bait. Now the meat was ready to go into sloppy joe sauce (and looked a lot more food-like). Heat and eat.
Once the congealed fat is removed and the broth drained off, the ground beef is EXTREMELY lean. This would be a VERY healthy way to eat ground beef
This beef is in small crumbles. The mouth feel isn’t as good as I remember ground beef being, and it seemed bland. Still it’s been years, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. It wouldn’t hold together to make burgers, and I doubt leaving the fat in would have helped with that. I bet some egg powder would have done the trick, but sloppy joes were the way we went. Sloppy joe sauce is also an easy store food with a shelf life of a few years.
After separating from the meat, we store the two other can contents… the broth will be used in a future soup, while the beef-embedded fat? Treats for our neighborhood outdoor cats who keep the mice away from our house.
The final product for half the can? Sloppy Joe. The other half is on its way to being part of a soup.
Taste
Seemed perfectly adequate but a not as full of flavor and good chunky mouthfeel as I seem to remember. I put a little salsa on my sloppy joes to wake it up a little, in fact. Yeah, I know; I took the fat off … but I used to do that after browning my own ground beef back in the day, too. But really, it’s browned ground beef. If you wanted to cook and eat ‘normal stuff’ and were a family of normal beef-eaters, this would probably make you happy.
Nutritional Information
The label included the whole can contents, of course. It was much higher in fat and calories than what we ate; by abut 1/2 a cup of pure fat. Do keep in mind that 2 oz servings equates to about half a quarter pounder-sized burger per serving. You’re only going to get 14 servings out of that can if you’re using the beef more as a flavoring for sauce than as a main ingredient.
If my math is right, 30 of 70 calories from fat works out to be about 75% lean, 25% fat by mass — pretty standard for ground beef, as I recall. Nutrition is just what you’d expect from ground beef; lovely protein and iron, high in fat and cholesterol, not much else going on.
Of course, one can also buy, brown and pressure can ground beef. It’s a lot cheaper (so long as you use the canner enough to justify its price). It’s also a lot more work. The people I know who do this say it’s easy to do, and they aim to use the canned meat up in a year or two. Shelf life is pretty much always better with glass-canned foods if you keep them dark, and all canned foods last better in cool, stable temperatures.
Bonus Keystone Ground Beef Chili Recipe:
Salty found this recipe on the Keystone Meats website, a quick easy chili that could be done basically entirely with storage foods. It was submitted by Keystone customer Donna G.
Chili as presented on the Keystone Meats website
Lazy Sunday Shredded Beef Chili
- 1 can (28 oz.) Keystone Beef, drained and mixed
- 2 cans mild chili beans
- 2 cans chopped tomatoes
- 1-1/2 package mild chili seasoning
- 1/2 cup dehydrated onions or 1/2 cup fresh chopped onions
- 1 tsp. jarred garlic or 1 clove minced garlic
- 1/2 cup ketchup
- 2 tsp. vegetable oil
- As you open and empty cans, use a small amount of water (a half of a can) to rinse all the cans and add water to the pot.
- If you use fresh onion & garlic, add a small amount of oil (1 tsp.) to your pot and sauté onions and garlic for about 4 minutes, do not let garlic burn, stir frequently.
- Add chili beans and tomato and shredded beef. Add dehydrated onions and garlic and the ketchup. Mix well, add packet of chili seasoning and a 1/2 cup of beef broth. Over medium to low heat, bring mixture to a boil, turn heat down to simmer and let cook for about 15 minutes to let flavors <this is where it ended, but you get the idea … Spice>
Keystone Canned Ground Beef
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Pros
- Pre-cooked just heat and serve
- Fat separates out, healthy
- Quality Meat
- Relatively long shelf life
- Easily stored & rotated
Cons
- More expensive than fresh
- Can't be made into patties
- Unappetizing in can
Thanks for the review.
Sorry that stuff looks nasty, and I do mean all out nasty, not even sure I would feed that to Blue…..
1/2 cup of pure fat for a 28 oz can huh???? AND 3/4 cup of water/juice,
No Thank You especially at $6.22 a can (shipped).
Yeah, well… we ate it so you don’t have to 🙂
I thought it looked pretty nasty too; didn’t help that I got out of the habit of eating samples of hundreds of animals all ground up in the same can years ago. It did not taste bad though; as compared to my memory of cheap fast-food style burgers.
Here’s the thing about the fat though: It calculated out to 75% lean. That’s actually *better* than a lot of grocery store burger (often 70%). Moreover, unappealing as the cluster at the top was, it allowed me to remove a large percentage of the fat in the sample, leaving us with very lean sloppy joes. I conclude it’s not actually worse than most burger at all; it’s just more obvious.
I’ve home canned ground beef, venison, bacon, sausage links and a number of other meats for long term storage. Ground beef, even browned, will have fat in the jar that will rise to the top and make the product look nasty. Problem is that today you are not really hungry. In a SHTF situation, your eyes may see things differently.
Clean, safe to eat, able to spice up flavors are big factors, imo. If you are rotating jars, use these in your ‘check runs for the real event’ cooking.
As for owning a canner, I can’t think of a reason to NOT own one. My rubber gasketed Presto was in use for over 20 years when I upgraded to an All American, and gave the Presto to my son. I expect both units to last as long as the cast iron skillet that I bought over 40 years ago and is still going strong.
I’ve seen some pretty nasty looking chicken come out of home canning jars, that gelatin is just… naw… I’ll skip, thanks.
Hmmmmm…
Regular burger has seen $4/# recently and this is pound and a half roughly.. cooked and shelf stable. I have used it before and it’s not too bad. Made great chili all from pantry and tacos another time. For preparedness meat it’s a win IMHO 😛
A friend of mine cans his own meats. And I have to agree with Rayk and Salty. I’ve eaten some of his home canned meats and in the jars they didn’t look very appealing to the eye either. But I thought his canned meats were fine and we made some tasty meals. If you canned this meats, where did you think the fat was going to go? I’ve also purchased some of Keystones products and personally like the pork and beef. I personally was found of the ground beef but used it in tacos. Sure it’s a little pricey verses canning your own from hunts or buying in bulk when it’s on sale. But not everyone wants to get into canning.
Paid 151.00 for 28 ounce cans. One heavily dented. Packer knows its dented before packaging. Won’t risk that again. Money is budgeted. Can’t be wasteful.