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

hey you guys it's carolyn from homesteading family and today i'm going to be showing you one of the easiest meals to get on your shelf we're going to be canning beef stew you're going to be amazed at how quick this project is how easy it is and how delicious it turns out [Music] hey if you want to see the written directions for this project click the link below in the description to go on over to a blog post on this exact project one of my favorite things to can is complete meals or convenience foods i love having ready-made meals on the shelf something that i know is healthy easy to grab and doesn't cost a ton of money and this is one of the easiest convenience convenience meals to put together this is beef stew you're going to be surprised at how easy this is now i have all of my equipment together let's talk real fast about what we need you're going to need your jar lifters you're going to want a some sort of a tool to get any bubbles out of the jars this is an actual bubble popper but you can use any sort of wooden implement or plastic implement for this that you can slide down into your jars like this of course you're going to want some measuring spoons you're going to want some clean kitchen towels a good clean dish cloth you're going to want a little bit of white vinegar ready to go in a dish and you'll need your jars now i love canning in these wide mouth quart size mason jar so that's what i'll be using today but you could use a pint-sized jar you could use small mouth if you wanted but it's a lot easier to work with a wide mouth in any size that you're going with if you're looking for just a single serving size 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 about it that is so easy okay let's talk about the ingredients now this is a wonderfully free form meal every single one of these ingredients is safe to can all by itself or in combination with each other so you get to choose the amounts of each ingredient you want to use per jar but what you'll need is some stew beef you could also use cubed pork you could use a venison you could even use chicken if you wanted you're going to want potatoes that have been peeled and then chopped some onions and some peeled and then again chopped carrots here and you're going to want some salt you can use any kind of good quality salt that you want you don't have to only use canning salt when you're canning but the difference is between the canning salt and a salt like this this is a redmon real salt so it has a lot of minerals in it is it might make your broth a little bit cloudy well the broth is going to be cloudy anyways because we've got potatoes going in there so you're going to see a little bit of starchiness in there 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 step one when we're doing anything with the pressure oh i forgot to mention the pressure canner of course we're gonna have our pressure canner doing anything with meat and low acid vegetables requires a pressure canner so back here i have my all-american pressure canner the all-americans are my absolute favorite canners to use and i have some water already put in there we're only going to put about two inches of water into that canner that's really important whenever you're pressure canning you never want to submerge your entire jars in water in the pressure canner now that's very different than water bath canning i also have a couple kettles of hot water going because i'm going to need to cover all the ingredients in the jar with the hot water you could also use broth if you wanted to okay so whenever 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 no longer have to sterilize jars yay that's great it saves us a whole step but you do need to have them clean washed with hot soapy water and warm so these jars are still warm to the touch you'll also want to do the same with your lids you don't have to keep these in warm water anymore either in fact it's not even recommended to do that anymore hot soapy water with uh washed with a soft cloth nothing scrubby for this bottom enamel on here is a great way to go and it'll just get you nice and clean same thing with your bands just hot soapy water we also want to get our water into our canner which i've already done and get it warming up now our goal is to have this canner almost steaming the water inside this can are almost steaming not quite by the time we're ready to put our loaded jars in there so right now i just have it on a very very gentle heat okay are you ready for how easy this is i'm going to get my hands right in because it's going to make it really easy so all i'm going to do is take whatever meat i have and go ahead and just start filling my jars now if you want to be real even about it you could put a cup of your meat in and a cup of each of the other vegetables in these are quart sized jars so that would fill you up just about right but you know what i'm just going to kind of eyeball this right here of course if you don't like using your hands to get into your ingredients you are welcome to use a tool with a funnel on the top of your jar that would work just fine now this is again the really like quick and dirty method of doing this like this is going to get the job done and it's going to taste great but there's a lot of ways to upgrade that and the most notable of that would be to brown this beef in just a little bit of oil before you did that that would make the color hold even a little bit nicer and and give it that kind of brown flavor to it that tastes so good but if you're doing a lot of these jars one after the other browning it really does take some time and sometimes you just have to get this stuff done so this is the kind of quick way to do it okay so i've got just about the same amount of meat in each of these jars roughly okay and then i'm going to go to my potatoes now again it's really important that your potatoes have been peeled we don't want to work with any root vegetables in canning that have not been peeled so you want to wash them first peel them and then go ahead and dice them now you could leave out any of these ingredients if you wanted let's say you didn't want the potato in there you could definitely go with just extra carrots and onions you could put a little 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 just fine all right i'll just use the rest of these guys up and then on to the carrots and just the same thing chop it up now we're looking to keep about a one inch head space here so we don't want to over fill our jars past about this big ring right there now you saw i just went ahead and settled some of those ingredients down a little in this jar do you see how much more room we got and you can do that you don't want to shove them down too hard you don't want it too tightly packed but you 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 real time can you believe how easy this is and this is the hardest part of pressure canning by the way preparing your preserve whatever it is you're preserving this is step two and it's the hardest part so if you can get through following a recipe then you've got pressure canning down you can completely do it okay and now the same thing with the onions i'm just going to top it off a little and try not to cry in the process these are garden fresh onions and let me tell you they are really really potent i love this time of year when all of the amazing things are coming out of the garden and they're so delicious so amazing okay six jars of beef stew almost completely ready to go into the canner oh i love how fast this is now again you can adjust the amounts any way you like them okay and the last thing that we need to add here is salt now if you're using these quart size jars you want to put about a teaspoon of salt in each jar if you are using a pint size you'd go with a half teaspoon so i'm just going to put it right over the top it will work its way through everything now you could add some other dry herbs or spices if you wanted at this point you'd want to stay away from some of the stronger ones like some sage or even too much oregano because they can turn a little bitter in the length of time that this is going to be in the canner but if you wanted to you could add some other seasonings to the jar right now dry spices or herbs i like to keep it kind of plain so i can take it in different directions when it comes out of the canner all right now i'm going to grab my hot water and this is actually boiling right now and i'm gonna cover up all of those things right to that one inch band on that jar all of the ingredients in there are totally covered up [Applause] now again you could use a beef broth in this you could use actually just about any sort of broth but whatever you're using you want it to be relatively low fat one of the challenges with canning is that if you get too much fat in that jar it can actually keep your jars from sealing well kind of lubricates the undersides 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 that 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 about measuring out that one inch you can always use the other side of this thing it's called a headspace ruler down here by just sticking it in and making sure that your liquid in your food only comes to that one inch line on there all right now at this point i usually just take a look and adjust a little bit if it's needed and i see that i have one jar that's just a little bit over full and i want to make sure that i don't keep anything over full i don't have very many onions in there so i'm going to reach down and try and get a few of the carrots out of there to just to make a little bit more room in that jar there we go that is perfect okay now we want to clean the rims this is step number three is to get the lids onto this jar and first thing we want to do is make sure that these rims are entirely clean so i have a little bit of white vinegar here whenever i'm canning with meat i want to make sure to use white vinegar just to remove any little bit of fat that might have gotten on the rim and a clean cloth and i'm just going to clean off the rim all the way around making sure there's no little grains of salt or anything else sitting up there that might disrupt the seal okay now i'm going to take my brand new lids and i'm just going to lay them out first now we're not working with a very large batch so we can just do these all at once but if you are working with a very large batch sometimes they do 19 jars at a time in a larger canner i would want to do them in small batches like this now the way we're going to put our lids on is we're going to make sure our lids are centered put the bands over the top then hold the lids down and screw them on we're just going to screw them on finger tight which means i don't want to get my wrist involved and start cranking on anything you can put these lids on too tight for their own good all right now my canner has come up to just about a steam so i went ahead and turned it off and we're ready to load the canner now i'm sure that i have a rack at the bottom you always want to make sure there's a rack at the bottom of your canner and then you're just going to settle your jars right on in okay now i always double check that my lids in the necks of the jars are not covered by water before i move ahead to the next step which is to get my lid on my canner okay if you're using one of these all-americans what you're going to want to do is make sure that this lid is level and then put your screw bands on and then we're going to tighten them that down with the tightening the screws that are straight across from each other two at a time that's to help keep that lid on evenly okay now we're going to go ahead and turn our canner on and bring it up to a full steam it's really best if you bring the canner up to temperature slowly that way you don't go way past and then you have a hard time getting your temperature regulated in your canner so i recommend bringing it up to a medium-high heat and letting it sit there for a while seeing if that will do the job all right step number four to pressure canning is venting your canner and that's what we're doing now we've brought up the pressure inside the canner and it's now steaming and we're going to let this steam for about 10 minutes once it comes to a solid steam right now it's still a little bit broken i'm not ready to start my actual timer yet it'll get there any second though all right so the steam is all the way at its full venting level and it's time to go ahead and start that 10 minute timer to completely vent the canner all right so step number five now that the canner has vented for 10 minutes is to pressurize the canner and that's where i'm going to go ahead and put my weight on now i'll be using my weighted gauge and not the dial gauge for this scanner so i want to make sure to choose the correct weight for my elevation for me i'm going to be canning at 15 pounds pressure but you need to check your elevation and make sure you're canning at the correct pressure we're just gonna slip this right on on oh that got nice and quiet didn't it all right so now we're going to let this canner come up to its full pressure because i'm using this weighted gauge i'll be listening for the canner to start jiggling or that weight to start jiggling we're aiming for about four jiggles per minute it's a little hard to be that precise but that's the goal we're headed towards now we want to remember to go ahead and bring this pressure up slowly so that we don't just blow past our goal pressure and then have to come back down and then it takes a long time to get your pressure stable so slowly coming up is the way to go okay we're still just a little bit over pressure but we're ready to start that 90 minute timer now for step number six which is to process your food so it's processing when it's at high pressure when it's at the correct pressure or above and we're going to hold that at that pressure for up for 90 minutes on this particular stew okay so the canner has been processing for its full 90 minutes it's time to go ahead and turn it off now we're moving on to step seven which is to cool the canner now this is really important step that we do this correctly we want it naturally to come all the way down to zero pressure that means i'm not going to sit here and hit my weight i'm not going to remove the weight i'm not going to do anything until this comes all the way naturally down to no pressure or zero pressure and that's when you would use the dial gauge on an all-american canner is to tell when it's telling you that it's down to zero now this is going to take probably half an hour to 45 minutes to cool all the way so we're just gonna wait all right the pressure has come all the way back down to zero so now we can go ahead and remove the weight there might be a little steam that comes out when that when you remove it and that's okay that's normal um we're going to let the canner sit just like that for between five and ten minutes we're not going to open it yet we're just going to let that 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 to remove the jars from the pressure canner and then to let them cool so now it's time to go ahead and take the lid off the pressure canner [Music] now these jars are still very very hot in fact they're probably still boiling on the inside of them so we want to be really careful while we pull them out we also want to be absolutely sure that we don't tip them or bonk them against anything now we're going to bring them out and set them onto a towel giving them about two fingers width of space in between each jar all right and there you have it you have six quarts of wonderful beef stew ready to go but we're not quite done yet because we need to let these sit for about 16 hours undisturbed in order to let them cool all the way and let their seals on their lids seal all the way down and firm up okay so after we do that 18 hour we're going to take the next steps and here's some beef stew that i made a couple days ago and i canned it a couple days ago now the vegetables were all mixed up in this and not just in layers like this one so that's why it looks a little bit different but now we're going to move on to step nine which is to check the seals now you want to do this right after they have cooled all the way down at about that 16 to 18 hour mark and the reason for that is if you have a jar that did not seal properly it's still safe to eat for 24 hours after it comes out of the canner so you can get it at that point put it into your refrigerator and consume it within the next few days it needs to make it into the refrigerator within that 24 hours though if it's not sealed so both of these sealed beautifully we need to go ahead and take their bands off and clean the jars at all if they're at all dirty or sticky or anything has gotten on the outside of them you never want to put anything dirty into your pantry okay now we need to make sure that we label our jars never put anything away that's not labeled i like to take a permanent marker and just write right on the top of the lids what is in it and the year that's on it and now step number 10 is to store our jars so you're going to want to put these on your pantry shelf somewhere where they don't get too hot like 120 degrees hot and somewhere where they don't freeze but they're generally shelf stable and of course it's best if they're in a dark environment so that you don't lose nutritional value and then whenever you're ready to use them you're just going to pull them out pull the lid off dump it into a pot heat it up and it's ready to eat these are absolutely delicious served over egg noodles over rice over any other grain that you like to use or they're really good all by themselves with a side of salad and some fresh sourdough french bread it's absolutely delicious and a wonderful way to get a meal on your shelf enjoy you guys

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 361,936

Rating: 4.9487104 out of 5

Keywords: Homesteading Family, Food Preservation, how to can stew, how to can stew, how to can stew beef, canning, beef, beef stew, pressure canning, meat, canner, canning meat, stew, can, pressure, beef stew recipe, pressure canning meat, home canning, how to make beef stew, pressure canning stew, canning beef stew meat, quick meals, beef stew recipes, how to make beef stew soup, pressure canning soup, home canning basics, home canning meat, home canning recipes

Id: DyTQMVyIfjU

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020