How to Pressure Can Beef Stew | Filling Your Pantry with Convenience Meals

Hey guys, I'm Carolyn from a farming family and today I'm going to show you one of the easiest foods to get on

your

shelves. Let's can can

beef

stew

. You will be surprised how fast this project is. how easy it is and how delicious it is. Hey, if you want to see the written instructions for this project, click the link below in the description to go to a blog post about this exact project. One of my favorite things to can is complete.

meals

or ready

meals

I love having ready meals on the shelf, something I know is healthy, easy to eat and doesn't cost a lot of money and this is one of the easiest ready meals to make.

This is

beef

stew

. You'll be surprised how easy it is now that I have all my gear together. Let's talk real quick about what we need. You will need

your

jar lifters. You will need some type of tool to get. any bubbles coming out of the jars, this is a real bubble pop, but you can use any type of wooden or plastic instrument for this that you can slide into your jars this way, of course you will need some measuring spoons. you're going to want some clean dish towels, a nice clean tea towel, you're going to want some white vinegar ready to go on a plate and you're going to need your jars now.

I love canning in these wide mouth, quart size mason jars, so that's what I'm going to use today, but you could use a pint size jar, you could use a small mouth if you wanted, but it's much more easy to work with a wide mouth in any size you choose if you are looking for. For a single serving of beef stew, you could even use a half pint jar if that's what worked for you, of course, you'll need your new lids and you'll need some bands, that's it, it's very easy, okay, let's talk about it. the ingredients now, this is a wonderfully free meal, each of these ingredients are safe to can alone or in combination with each other, so you can choose the amounts of each ingredient you want to use per jar, but what you will need. what you need is some stewed meat, you can also use diced pork, you can use venison, you can even use chicken if you want, you will want potatoes peeled and then chopped, some onions and some carrots peeled and then again chopped here and you go If you want a little bit of salt, you can use any kind of good quality salt you want, you don't have to just use canning salt when you're canning, but the difference is between canning salt and a salt like this. a real redmond salt so it has a lot of minerals it can make the broth a little bit cloudy well the broth will be cloudy anyway because we have potatoes in there so you'll see a little bit it's a little bit starchy so I'm not worried about it at all and I'd rather use my really good quality salt than something with chemicals that I don't want in there okay so the first step when we're doing something with the

pressure

Oh I forgot to mention the

pressure

canner of course.

We are going to have our pressure canner. Making anything with low acid meat and vegetables requires a pressure canner, so here I have my all-American pressure canner, the all-American ones are my absolute favorite. Canners to use and I already have some water put in there. We're only going to put about two inches of water in that canner. That's really important. Whenever you are pressure canning, you never want to submerge all the jars in water in the pressure canner. Now that's very different than water bath canning. I also have a couple of kettles with hot water because I'm going to need to cover all the ingredients in the jar with the hot water.

You can also use broth if you want. we're canning I like to teach it in 10 different steps if we're pressure canning and the first step is to prepare our jars, our lids and our canners, you don't have to sterilize the jars anymore, yeah, that's great, it saves us a whole step, but You need to wash them in warm, soapy water so these jars are still warm to the touch. You'll also want to do the same with the lids. You no longer have to store them in warm water. In fact, it's no longer even recommended to do that with hot water and soap, uh, wash with a soft cloth, nothing scrubbing for this bottom polish here is a great way to do it and it will leave you nice and clean, same with your bands , just hot water and soap.

We also want to put our water in our canner, which I already did, and heat it up now. Our goal is to have this canner almost smoking. The water inside this can is almost smoking, not quite when we are ready to put it. our jars loaded in there, so now I just have it on very low heat, are you ready for how easy this is? I'm going to stick my hands in because it's going to make it really easy, so all I'm doing is What I'm going to do is take whatever meat I have and go ahead and start

filling

my jars now.

If you want to be honest, you can put a cup of your meat and a cup of each of the other vegetables in these are a quart. oversized jars so they fill you up pretty good, but you know, I'm going to look at this right here, of course, if you don't like using your hands to access ingredients, you can use a tool. with a funnel on the top of your jar that would work well now this is again the really quick and dirty method of doing this so it will get the job done and taste delicious but there are lots of ways to improve that and the most notable would be to brown this meat in just a little bit of oil before doing it, that would make the color hold even a little better and give it that kind of brown flavor that tastes so good, but if you're browning a lot of these jars one after the other, it really takes some of time and sometimes you just have to finish this so this is the quickest way to do it so I have almost the same amount of meat in each of these jars pretty much right and then I'm going to go to my potatoes now again.

It is very important that the potatoes are peeled. We don't want to work with any tubers in canning. They have not been peeled, so you must first wash them, peel them, and then cut them into cubes. Now you can leave out any of these ingredients if you want, let's say you don't want the potato in there, you can definitely just use more. carrots and onions, you could put some celery in here if you wanted, you could even leave out the meat if you're just looking for a hearty vegetable stew that would be nice, I'll use the rest of these guys. and then to the carrots and the same thing, cut them up now we're looking to keep about an inch of head space here so we don't overfill our jars beyond this big ring right there, you saw it.

I just went ahead and packed some of those ingredients into this jar a little bit. See how much more space we have? You can do it. You don't want to push them too hard. You don't want it to be too tight, but. They can definitely remove a little bit of that air space in there to get a little bit more. Oh, I'm throwing carrots. Okay, you guys are watching this in real time. Can you believe how easy it is and this is the hardest part of pressure canning? the way you prepare your preserve, whatever it is, you're preserving, this is step two and it's the hardest part, so if you can follow a recipe, then your pressure is down, you can do it completely right and now the same thing With the onions, I'm just going to finish them off a little bit and try not to cry in the process.

These are fresh onions from the garden and let me tell you, they are really very potent. I love this time of year when all the wonderful things are coming. They came out of the garden and they are so delicious, so amazing, okay, six jars of beef stew almost completely ready to go to the canner, oh, I love how quick it is, now again you can adjust the quantities however you want, okay, and I last. What we need to add here is salt. Now, if you are using these quart jars, you want to put about a teaspoon of salt in each jar.

If you're using a pint size, you would use half a teaspoon, so I'm just going to put it right on top and it'll work its way through everything. Now you can add other dried herbs or spices if you like. At this point, you'll want to stay away from some of the stronger ones, like sage or even as well. lots of oregano because they can get a little bitter during the time it will be in the canner, but if you want you can add some other seasonings to the jar right now, spices or dried herbs, I like to keep it simple so I can take it in different directions when it comes out of the canner , right now I'm going to grab my hot water and this is boiling right now and I'm going to cover all those things right up to that one. one inch band on that jar, all the ingredients in it are totally covered now again, you could use a beef broth in this, you could actually use almost any type of broth, but whatever you use, you want it to be relatively low in fat.

One of the challenges with canning is that if you put too much fat in that jar, it can actually prevent the jars from sealing well, it kind of lubricates the bottom of the lids and we don't want that, okay, now we're going to take our bubble. popping tool again, you could use a plastic knife for this, you could use a wooden skewer and we're just going to go down in four different places around the jar just to make sure we don't have any really big bubbles hiding in there. It would cause a change in our headspace as we can, okay and then we're just going to top off that liquid back to that one inch headspace now.

If you don't feel confident measuring that inch, you can always use the other side. of this thing is called the headspace rule down here, just sticking it on and making sure that the liquid in the food only comes up to that one inch line, at this point I usually just take a look at it and adjust it a little bit. if need be and I see I have a jar that's a little full and I want to make sure I don't leave anything too full, I don't have a lot of onions in there so I'm going to reach down and try to get some carrots out of there to make a little more room in that jar, there we go, it's perfect.

Now we want to clean up the edges. This is step number three: placing the lids. this jar and the first thing we want to do is make sure that these edges are completely clean, so I have a little bit of white vinegar here whenever I'm canning meat, I want to make sure that I use white vinegar just to remove a little bit. of grease that might have gotten on the edge and a clean cloth and I'm just going to wipe the edge all over making sure there aren't any little grains of salt or anything else up there that could break the seal, okay?

I'm going to take my new lids and put them on first. Now that we are not working with a very large batch, we can do them all at once, but if you are working with a very large batch. sometimes they make 19 jars at a time in a larger canner. I would like to make them in small batches like this. Now, the way we're going to put the caps on is to make sure that our caps are centered. Put the bands. on top, then hold the caps down and screw them on. We're just going to screw them on with our fingers, which means I don't want to get my wrist involved and start turning anything.

You can put these lids on too tight for their Okay, now my canner has almost reached steam, so I went ahead and turned it off and we're ready to load the canner. Now I'm sure I have a grid at the bottom that you always want to make. I'm sure there's a rack in the bottom of your canner and then you're going to put the jars right in. Well, now I always check that the lids on the necks of the jars are not covered by water before I move on to The next step, which is to cover my canner, okay, if you're using one of these all-American ones, what you're going to want do is make sure this lid is level and then put the threaded bands on and then we're going to tighten them by tightening the screws that are facing each other, two at a time, that's to help keep the lid evenly nice, now we're going to continue Go ahead, turn on our canner and lift it up. at full steam, it's actually better if you bring the pot up to temperature slowly, that way you don't go overboard and then have a hard time regulating the temperature in the pot, so I recommend turning it up to a medium-high level.

Heat it up and let it sit there for a while to see if that works well. Step number four to pressure canning is to vent your canner and that's what we're doing now, we've increased the pressure inside the canner and now it's smoking. and we are going to let this steam last for about 10 minutes once it becomes a solid steam. Right now it's still a little broken. I'm not ready to start my actual stopwatch, but it'll be there any second, though that's okay. the steam is completely at its full venting level and it's time to go ahead and start the 10 minute timer to fully vent the canner, so step number five now that the canner has been vented for 10 minutes is to pressurize the canner and that is. where I'm going to go ahead and put my weight in now I'm going to use my weighted meter and not the dial meter for this one.scanner, so I want to make sure I choose the right weight for my lift.

You will be canning at 15 pounds of pressure, but you should check your elevation and make sure you are canning at the correct pressure. Let's just put this on oh.that got nice and quiet, wasn't that good? So now we're going to let this canner go up to its maximum pressure because I'm using this weighted gauge and I'll be listening until the canner starts moving or that weight starts moving, our goal is about four movements per minute, it's a little hard to be so precise, but that's the goal we're heading towards now, we want to remember that we need to go ahead and increase this pressure slowly so that we don't just go over our target pressure and then have to go back down and then it takes a long time to stabilize the pressure, so going up slowly is the way to go okay we're still a little bit over pressure but we're ready to start that 90 minute timer now for step number six which is processing the food so it's processed when are at high pressure, when they are at the correct pressure or higher, and we are going to keep it at that pressure for up to 90 minutes in this particular stew, okay, so the canner has been processing for its full 90 minutes, it's time to continue and turn it off now let's go to step seven, which is to cool the canner.

Now this is a really important step that we do this correctly. I want it to naturally drop to zero pressure. That means I'm not going to sit here and reach my weight. I'm not going to remove the weight. I'm not going to do anything until this comes completely naturally. until there is no pressure or there is zero pressure and that's when you would use the dial indicator on an all-American canner to know when it tells you it's at zero. Now this will probably take between half an hour and 45 minutes to cool everything down. So we're going to wait, okay, the pressure has gone back down to zero, so now we can go ahead and remove the weight, there might be a little bit of steam coming out when you remove it and that's okay.

That's normal, we're going to let the canner sit like this for five to ten minutes, we're not going to open it yet, we're just going to let the pressure equalize from the outside to the inside of the canner, okay? so now we're ready to move on to step eight which is removing the jars from the pressure cooker and then letting them cool so now it's time to go ahead and take the lid off the pressure cooker now that these jars are still very, very In fact, they're probably still boiling inside, so we want to be very careful as we take them out.

We also want to be absolutely sure we don't tip them over or hit them against anything now that we're going. to take them out and place them on a towel giving them about two fingers of space between each jar, and there you have it, you have six quarts of wonderful beef stew ready to go, but we're not done yet because I need to let them sit for about 16 hours without touching them to Let them cool completely and let the seals on the lids completely seal and firm up, so after doing those 18 hours we're going to take the next one. steps and here is a beef stew that I made a couple of days ago and canned it a couple of days ago.

Now the vegetables were all mixed in this and not just layered like this, which is why it looks a little different, but now Let's move on to step nine, which is checking the seals. Now you want to do this right after they've cooled completely, about 16 to 18 hours, and the reason is that if you have a jar that wasn't sealed properly, it's still safe to eat for 24 hours after it comes out of the canner. , so you can get it at that time, put it in your refrigerator and consume it in the next few days, it should reach the refrigerator within that time frame.

However, 24 hours if it's not sealed, so they're both beautifully sealed, we need to go ahead and take the bands off and clean the jars if they're dirty or sticky or if there's something stuck to the outside that you never want. to put anything dirty in your

pantry

, okay now we need to make sure we label our jars, never put anything away that isn't labeled, I like to take a permanent marker and write right on the top of the lids what's in it and the year . that's it and now step number 10 is to store our jars, so you'll want to put them on your

pantry

shelf somewhere where they won't get too hot, like 120 degrees, and somewhere where they won't freeze but will.

Generally, they are stable and of course it is best if they are in a dark environment so that they do not lose their nutritional value and then when you are ready to use them you will simply take them out and remove the lid. pour it into a pot, heat it up and it's ready to eat, they are absolutely delicious and served with egg noodles, rice and any other grains you like to use or they are really good on their own with a side of salad and some fresh sourdough. French bread is absolutely delicious and a wonderful way to have a meal on your shelf, enjoy guys.