Prepper Mom: Pressure Canning: Soup With Meat

It's the day before Thanksgiving and you are looking forward to cutting up the bird, your mouth waters over the idea of leftover rolls stuffed with turkey on your way out to shop on Black Friday, but by Sunday you know that you will not care if you never see another ounce of poultry. Ever wonder if you can save yourself this misery? Well, you can. No, literally, if you can then you can save your poor overloaded tastebuds.

Making soup, chili, even spaghetti sauce is something I love to do, and I usually make a huge pot full. Dinner is served and the rest goes immediately into newly sterilized jars bound for the pressure canner and ultimately onto a shelf. Nothing about canning is hard as long as you follow the directions. Every pressure canner is different so YOU MUST READ THE DIRECTIONS FOR YOUR PARTICULAR CANNER!!

I use an All-American canner and these directions are step-by-step for that specific style of canner. Some of the instructions are generic; for example, any canning project starts with sterilizing your jars and lids, and prepping the food you wish to can. Boiling bath canners and pressure canners alike need to have a jar rack in the bottom to keep the boiling water from slamming the jars onto the bottom of the pot and causing those jars to break.

Boiling bath or pressure canner, which method to use?

If your food has plenty of acid (and sugar is an acid), it can be processed in a boiling bath canner: jams, jellies, and pickles can be done this way. Any low acid food including meat have to be processed by pressure canning. There are many websites that go into these processes in much more depth then I will use here; my favorite is: pickyourown.org

So here we go:

Sterilize your jars and lids. Put the rack into the bottom of the pot, place your jars in, and fill with hot water until all jars are filled, and the pot is filled one inch above the tops of all of the jars. Bring the pot to a rolling boil and maintain this for a minimum of 10 minutes. If you choose to boil them for longer, add more water as needed to maintain the water level (I usually boil my jars for 20 minutes or so.)

Turn the burner off and remove the jars from the water using the jar tongs in your canning toolkit. Empty the water from the jars and set the hot jars on a towel in preparation for filling the jars. You want to be ready to fill the jars at this point. The longer the jars spend out in the open air, the more likely they may become contaminated. I usually set my lids into a pan at this point and bring them to a boil for a few minutes. You need them sterile, and the gummy rubber needs to be pliable, but boiling them too hard will damage the seal. Again, do not put too much stress into this, boil, then back off the heat to a simmer and leave it there until you need the lids.

Using the funnel from your canning toolkit, fill the jars. Stop filling when the level is about even with where the screw threads begin on the jar (see picture). There is a lot of debate on how high to fill your jars on many canning forums, I usually stop at the threads as I described above when I am pressure canning, with boiling canning, I go a bit higher. The seal will not form if you go too high though, so be careful with the level.

Wipe the edge of the jars!!! This very simple step is so easy to forget and so annoying when you do. Nothing will seal if you forget to wipe the edges of your jars! Wet the corner of a paper towel with hot water and go around the edge a few times to remove any food that may have splatter there during filling.

Use the magnetic lid grabber from your canning toolkit to grab a lid, one at a time, and place it on the jar. I use a system of: wipe the edge, get a lid, place the lid, screw on the ring, place into canner.

***To this point, boiling bath and pressure canning is identical. After this point is the variation for pressure canning, specifically with an All-American canner.***

With the jars filled, lids and rings on, and all placed into the canner, add water until the level is halfway up the side of the jars: more for quart size, less for pints. If you and lucky enough to have a canner that will hold another level of jars, just fill to halfway up on the first row, but don't forget to add a canning rack on top of the first stack of jars before starting the second stack.

Move the canner to the stove, and oil the bevel of the pot with olive oil. This bevel is where the lid of the pot meets the body of the pot. The oil allows for the formation of a seal within the pot to keep the pressure. Once the bevel is oiled, place the lid on the pot following the arrow and screw it into place.

The knobs should be brought up onto the lid and screwed into place in sets of opposites, like tightening lug nuts on a car tire. If you do the 12 o'clock knob, do the 6 o'clock knob at the same time. This opposite tightening allows the lid to be tightened evenly and prevents the possibility of the lid warping.

Turn the heat on again and you will notice that your pot will begin to hiss through the spout on the top of the lid. Once this hissing is constant without and breaks, start your timer for 7 minutes. Vent the pot for that 7 minutes before adding the weight or closing the vent.

When 7 minutes is up, add your jiggler weight or close the vent. I use the jiggler weight on the 10 psi setting. This weight comes with the possibility for 5, 10, and 15 psi. To determine which one you need to use, you should read the directions for your pot. The benefits of using the jiggler over just closing the vent are great. I ended up buying 2 jiggler / vent kits since "two is one, and one is none." The weight keeps the pressure inside the canner right around 10 psi with no help from me. This frees up my time to do other things, like that post to the blog last night. If all you have is the vent which you close then have to watch the pressure gauge, I started canning that way and I can completely sympathize. Consider getting the weight, it is worth the money!

Process your jars in the canner for 90 minutes since my soup has meat. The time varies depending on what you are canning, but for meat, it's 90 minutes.

An hour and a half after beginning, turn off the heat and remove the canner from the burner. Allow the pressure to drop to 0 before removing the weight.

Once the pressure on the gauge is at 0, remove the jiggler and wait for the hissing to stop. Then unscrew the knobs by opposites again, unscrew the lid, and remove the jars from the pot onto a waiting towel using the jar tongs. The contents of the jars will still be boiling and making all sorts of noise, this is fine. As the jars begin to cool, you will hear the satisfying "pop" noise of the lids sealing.

Left: Sealed, Right: Not Sealed

Once cool, any lids that do not seal should be removed from the jar, the edge wiped again, and a new lid used before processing again. I usually put the jar into the fridge and eat it within a few days, or put it into the freezer. The jars that did seal should be washed and dried since they will be greasy. Rings are optional at this point, and the jars do fine without them if you care to leave them off.

But that's it, you can label your jars with contents and canning date and stack them into your inventory. It is time intensive, but well worth it. Having jars of homemade soup, chili, or spaghetti sauce in the pantry makes dinner preparation on busy nights a breeze!