Canning Stew: Make Your Own Convenience Food

[Music] hey everybody this is Carolyn from homesteading family and I love home-cooked meals I just love feeding my family really healthy good for you food that I know exactly what was in it but let's face it cooking every single meal from scratch can take a long time and sometimes you just need a break or you need a quick meal and so that's why it is wonderful to know how to pressure can so that you can make your own convenience foods that are just sitting there waiting for you now we're going to go ahead and pressure can some venison stew today and I think you guys are going to be amazed at how simple this is it's not scary and it's not hard and I'm going to show you how to do this now we have a nice bowl here of this beautiful fresh of innocent Josh just got this this morning just went in harvested a venison from out on the property and I just have this nice roast cut up into chunks now you could do this with beef you could do this with lamb with elk with moose whatever red meat you have on hand and just go ahead and take a nice roast that doesn't have too much connective tissue or too many fatty bits and just go ahead and chop that up into nice chunks for a stew size chunks I also have some potatoes chopped here this is mostly red potatoes russets would be fine there's a few Gold's in here I find that the Reds hold up really well under the longer pressure pressure canning time and this again is just diced just a nice large dice you know as a stew size and no I did not peel them you can if you want but these are gonna pressure can for 90 minutes in the canner so there's no way that anything any bacteria from the skins is going to survive that pressure canning so I'm just not worried about that now I also have some carrots and these are some beautiful carrots that we've had in the pantry there's actually some purple carrots in here so they make this really and just some regular orange carrots and just again just dice them up a nice large dice for stew and then I have some onions that are chopped and some salt now when I'm getting ready to do a large canning project the first thing that I want to do is make sure I get my jars all ready so you can see we have been washing and drying jars back here making sure they're really nice and clean and they are ready to go so I have a few up here I'm going to fill right now now the next thing I do is get my kettle on to boil and by that I mean just my regular old tea kettle because we're going to need to top this off with boiling water after that I make sure that I have my canner ready to go so my canner my pressure canner has a little bit of water in it and it's heating up and I'm gonna take you out there and show you how I can my canning station set up outside so I'll take you out in just a few minutes once I have that ready to go in all of my equipment laid out then I'm ready to start filling my jars so this is so simple you guys are going to be amazed all that this takes is just putting a little bit of this stuff into each jar and so I'm gonna start over here I have very clean hands and I'm gonna take just a handful of onions and go ahead maybe I'll do two handfuls of onions in this jar and a couple of handfuls of carrots the order doesn't matter and the amount doesn't matter this is so simple because this is gonna can for the whole length of time you really don't need to worry about the recipe exactly it really you have a lot of latitude when your pressure canning especially for the full 90 minutes now I'm just gonna go ahead and drop in some meat and I'm just gonna do a couple of handfuls of meat now the great thing about this is you get to can it in water because that meat in there is going to go ahead and make its own broth while it cans under the pressure and we're just gonna pack that right up leaving a good about inch of head space there and on to the next jar so you can see how simple this is just some onions some carrots and you're just gonna do this for all the jars that you want to fill and if you want to leave one of these things out that's fine maybe you want to do more carrots or less carrots however you want to formulate yours that is absolutely fine and again just go ahead and pack that in there okay and I'm gonna do one more and you can see how fast this goes once you have these veggies chopped this is not a labor intensive project which is really nice especially if you've already harvested the meat that day you're ready for a little bit of a break anyways something simple to do now a lot of times while we are cleaning meat I will just get this started right away and you know I'll end up with 40 jars can by the time we're done cutting and wrapping anything we want to go in the freezer so that just makes your day so efficient especially if you have a nice large pressure canner that can hold a lot now I'm just gonna take a teaspoon of salt and put that right on the top of each jar this is entirely for flavoring if you for any reason want to leave the salt out there is no safety involved in putting the safe salt in so go ahead and just leave it out if you would like personally I say up any seasonings for later any herbs or anything like that because you know I feel that between the salt and the onion you really just have a good enough product and it's plenty flavorful alright so now that I have that done I'm gonna grab my tea kettle okay now my kettles been boiling so it is very hot and I am just going to go ahead and pour that right on over the top of all of these goodies in the jar and fill it right up to about that inch of head space there we go it stood starting to cook that meat almost instantly on tact and this is going to be wonderful because when you have this done everything is going to be so well cooked that meat is going to be super tender it's gonna be really flavorful and all you'll have to do is dump it into a pot and heat it up for a few minutes and you will be ready to go now one thing you really do need to do in this part of the process is to make sure that you are well overfilled that one a little enough to take a little out make sure that you don't have any air bubbles in there now this is not packed so tightly that you can't just kind of give it a little jiggle and make sure that there are no air bubbles right in there so okay I overfilled the water on this one so I'm just gonna pull it out by the spoon cold before I make a mess and just pour a little pull a little bit out back down to about the the bottom ring on that jar there we go if you put too much liquid in there then what you'll do is it will go ahead and force it out of the jar while it's canning and that can get food particles on your rim which will not allow your jar to seal properly it'll also force out a lot of that liquid and then you're left with a jar that only has liquid partially up and that's actually not a problem health-wise that's okay but it's not as pretty because some of this the food above the liquid can start to discolor a little it's fine to eat but you know we like our stuff to look good too all right so now I'm gonna take my clean rag here I'm gonna take a clean spot of this and I'm gonna take just a tad of water that I have just clean water and I'm gonna go ahead and go around the rim very carefully to be sure that there is no food particles no salt or anything like that spilled on the rim because that could keep your jars from sealing property properly and we sure don't want that I tend to go through afterwards with a clean dry finger and just double-check if you feel any Nicks if you feel any food or anything then your jars just won't seal properly and it's you know frustrating when you have jars that don't seal well now I'm gonna go ahead and take my flat lids and put them on there used to be a recommendation that you heat these there is no longer that recommendation so you can just put them right on and then take my screw top and tighten those down just finger tight all that means is I don't really need to get in there and wrench it down real hard with my whole hand just to the strength that your fingers can just tighten it down all right now the next step is getting these into the cannon alright so you can see that the pressure canner is nicely heated and while I'm putting the jars in I'm gonna turn the key off I always do this and let it just drop down just a little bit on temperature so it's not quite such a shock to the jars now the next step is going to be getting your food into the pressure canner never try to do this without the jar lifters I've done it several times it's hard and you are very likely to get burnt we're just gonna settle these right on down now these jars are hot from putting in that boiling water and of course the water in here is hot it's not quite boiling yet but it's very close we're gonna get these settled right on in alright so now we're going to go ahead and get our lid on the canner this particular canner has an arrow and a line to match up to so you know right where to line your lids and then you're gonna go ahead and just slide the lock right on over and snug it on down now when we start we want to make sure we do not have a cap or a weighted gauge or jiggler or anything on our vent over here and that's so that we can let the steam build up and go ahead and push all the air out because remember we're kind of creating a vacuum in here because we're sealing all that pressure so we want the steam to be able to build up and push out all that air so you don't want to start with your jiggler or your weight on there so we're gonna go ahead and get this locked down now and the best way to do this is do opposing sides and go ahead and tighten it slightly just get it a little bit tight right off and then we'll go back through and tighten them all the way down alright now we're gonna put our heat back on and bring that temperature up to a nice steam check this at that point about every 5 minutes until you get a nice steady stream of coming right out here out of the pressure release and once that stream builds up then we're gonna start a timer for about ten minutes and then we can put the cap on and start building up pressure all right well we're losing light fast here in the North Idaho winter days that are so short but you can see that hopefully you can see that we actually have quite a bit of steam coming out of our steam vent right here so we're gonna start the timer for 10 minutes and let the steam evacuate for about ten minutes here before we go ahead and put our weight on and for me I use a 15 pound weight because I'm up in elevation if you're at sea level you go ahead and just use 10 pounds on your weight all right now meat products need a full 90 minutes at their full pressure so we're gonna let that pressure build right on up to the to the correct poundage for your elevation and then we're gonna start the timer for 90 minutes and we're gonna let that go the whole 90 minutes making sure we keep our pressure pretty steady right in our target zone then after that 90 minutes is done we are gonna go ahead and turn the heat off on our pressure canner and leave it alone you want that pressure to drop back down completely naturally don't sit there and hit the way to make it drop faster don't remove the weight what that will do is change that pressure too quickly and it will crack your jars or it will force food out of your jars which will cause it not to seal properly then after that has come all the way down to the correct / to zero - no pressure at all then you can remove your weight at that point wait for ten more minutes and then you can open your jars get them out of the canner and set them somewhere in a draught free location to cool now I take my jars back inside because I certainly don't want to set them out here in the freezing temperature and I let it go ahead and sit there to cool completely down for between 16 to 24 hours at which point I can take the Rings off clean up the jars if there's anything on them label them and put them on the shelves take care of you guys and enjoy your own bacon begin to buy [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 461,900

Rating: 4.8991895 out of 5

Keywords: Homestead, homesteading, homesteading family, homesteading skills, homesteading 101, homesteading for beginners, homesteading life, homesteading lifestyle, homesteading off grid, living off grid, off grid living, self-sufficient, self-sufficiency, being prepared, living prepared, preparedness, prepping, prepper, canning stew, canning meat, canning venison, canning deer meat, pressure canning stew, pressure canning meat, pressure canning venison

Id: iwJ0c7pgahw

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2018