My pressure canned food turned out gross. What gives?

A couple of things I think might help you. With your chili, you should be following a tested and approved recipe only. What does tested and approved mean? It means that the recipe has not only been tasted to be certain that the resulting food is of good quality, but also tested in a laboratory to ensure that the heat has penetrated properly so that it has been preserved properly to prevent spoilage and illness including botulism.

Campbells has spent millions of dollars testing their recipes to come up with something that is not only tasty, but safe and shelf stable. They have tons of bajillion-dollar equipment that can do things that we can't do in our kitchens and there are something like 13 things listed in the ingredients that we can't pronounce that enable them to can stuff that normally can't be canned.

While convenience foods are nice, they're not what canning is about. Canning is preserving food and it's much more science than art like general cooking is.

Soups are a bit of a special category. You don't have to follow a strictly approved recipe if you follow the approved methods to a tee. Doing this, the processing time is 60 minutes for pints and 75 minutes for quarts. The difference in the processing time between 75 and 90 minutes really does matter and I have a feeling this is why your soup tastes the way it does.

I know it's impossible for new canners to really know this now, especially when everything you want to know is just a Google away, but canning really, really, REALLY must be done only following the established guidelines. The links on the sidebar are all good sources.

Just as a little side note - when someone refers to a recipe as "tested" for canning, always ask what they mean. "Tested at home," "I made it and it tasted good," "I've been doing it for years," "My grandma did it this way," and "No one has died" are never appropriate answers.

As ever, how a large commercial operation does things and home results are not comparable due to the nature of the equipment and environment. Campbell's also can can noodle soup.

Were you following approved recipes?

There are some canned things I don't care for, but it's a texture thing... not a flavor or smell issue. I primarily can whole muscle meats (chicken breasts, strips of pork shoulder, corned beef, cubed chuck), as well as salmon and trout. I can broth as well. These things give me options to make soup, stew, fillings for things like enchiladas or burritos, chicken salad, beef salad, or just meat to add to other quick meals. I usually eat the salmon in pasta or as an appetizer on crackers.

I'm curious about your statement regarding "cooling overnight without pulling the stopper off". You mean you processed and then did a natural release (allowing the pressure to fall on it's own), but did not remove the jars to the counter? This would have allowed the jars to stay hot longer and may have contributed to the poor texture you experienced. As far as flavor goes I don't think that would have changed.

You might play with a batch of chicken or pork since it's inexpensive and see how that comes out for you. And also try a couple jars using the hot pack method and the raw pack method, you might prefer one over the other.

I've found that pressure canned chicken develops a... unique odor. Reminiscent of cat food, for me. I pressure can stock all the time, but haven't tried actual soup. I've also done chicken thighs, and find them useful for when you need shredded chicken in a meal, but don't want to take the time to cook it before you make the rest of the recipe... enchiladas, stuff like that. I was VERY reticent to use it the first time I opened the jar, but went forward with the recipe. The taste is fine, honestly. The smell dissipates and the chicken is really soft, but tastes perfectly fine. I've also done chunks of sausage. Those didn't smell gross, and tasted just fine as well.

You're cooking the food in a tiny enclosed space and at a higher temperature and for longer than you'd normally do. So textural changes are inevitable. Honestly, I'm a ridiculously picky eater which is why I cook- I want it the way I want it, and I don't want to inflict that on anyone else, so I just do it myself. I don't like mushy textures... so my pressure canner is used about 85% for stock. I consider it TOTALLY worth the cost, just for that. Most other recipes I try in small quantities first. I know from experience I probably will hate it if it has vegetables in it and I try to eat them as-is. My next plan is to try canning some vegetable soups with the intent to open the jar, pour into a pot to reheat, and stick an immersion blender in it (and some dairy if it makes sense for the recipe.) You just have to figure out what works for your own tastes.

This is really unusual.

Even though chicken has a sulfur smell to it, I have never experienced an odor from a broth. And definitely not from chicken soup. By the time it's soup, all of the unpleasant sulfur smells have outgassed, and are long gone.

I read your recipe below, and I think I have it? Onions. I've run into this before. Onions are delicious in slowly simmered soups and stews, but they're kinda like an explosive. You can cook them to a certain point, but then they give up being onions and turn into a very strong-tasting, dark brown sugar. If you have a lot of onions, the effect becomes very pronounced.

This works exceptionally well in French Onion Soup, and when coupled with beef broth, is a shining star of "explosives" being used properly. But in something like chicken soup, where onion is not the star attraction, you get a "roadside IED."

Swap out the fresh onions for onion powder, and you'll have much better results.

As for the beef in your chili, you might not have ground it enough. Ground meat from the grocery store has been ground once, dumped in a large mixer to blend the meat and fat, then ground a second time, sometimes even a third if the butcher doesn't think it's mixed enough. Also, they do the grinding in the meat cooler, where it's around 50 degrees.

Try cutting the meat into 1-inch cubes, then partially freeze them. They should be at the just-crunchy-but-still-squishy stage when you dump them in. This keeps the meat cold and prevents the fat from melting during the grinding, but it also ensures the blades get a good, sharp cut. If you want a second grind, make sure you re-chill the meat again, but you won't have to re-freeze.

Am I the only one who thinks that 90 minutes is crazy and "approved recipes" make boring meals that I might as well just buy the can of whatever and skip 10 steps?

http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_05/strips_cubes_chunks.html

Ive always canned my meats raw. Everything else produces over cooked mush.

In you're case I would also add you're raw veggies and cold broth. Process that for the 90 minutes.