Welcome to My Canning Cellar episode 8

I want to preface by reminding folks that it’s just me sitting at the kitchen table, and while I did speak of my hopes that the dog won’t bark, the phone won’t ring, and the dirt bikes don’t go racing by, I forgot to mention that my home is right across from the small but mighty town waterfall. So if you hear it roaring, you’re welcome. It’s one of my favorite sounds ever, but the pinging of sealed canning jars comes in a very close second. (and as a side note, I did get a phone ding from my grandson because I forgot to shut off the cell volume)

My husband eats a lot of beans and has been the baked bean maker in the family. To me, it’s a lot of work for something that the one time I tried, the beans never got soft.

But with an abundance of packages of dried beans I decided to try canning them. The beans were pinto, Northern, kidney and navy. While I did start out using one kind per batch, I ended up just mixing random beans together to use them up, especially as I didn’t want jars of just kidney beans, with them not being our favorite.

What I made was 16 pints of baked beans with bacon, 13 pints of beans and hamburg, and 14 pints of beans and venison. Recipes in the show notes.

Because beans are a low acid food plus I was adding meat, I was most comfortable using my pressure canner. Here’s what I used for the beans and different meat combo per batch.

  • 4 lbs (10 cups) dry beans, again I had pinto, northern, kidney and navy

• water to cover
• 2 pounds cup up bacon or 2 pounds hamburg or 2 pounds small pieces of cut up venison
• 6 c diced onions
• 12 tablespoons minced garlic
• 4 c chicken stock
• 3 c brown sugar
• 2 c  molasses
• 1 c ketchup
• 1 c apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 c Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 c Dijon mustard
• 4 t sea salt
• 2 tsp cayenne pepper flakes
• 2 tsp ground black pepper-when the pandemic started I couldn’t find pepper anywhere but online and then it was super fine pepper. It is too fine to shake out onto everyday foods, so after finally finding the normal grind of pepper, I save the fine just for in canning and cooking. 

1. I started by sorting and rinsing the beans. When I did the pinto beans, that was the first time I’d ever found rocks in with beans, so now I know to never skip this step.
2. I put the beans in one of my big dutch ovens and add enough water to cover by 2 inches. I got them to a boil, over medium high heat and boiled them for 5 minutes.
3. I lowered the heat and let the beans simmer for 30 minutes.
4. As the beans were cooking, I put the diced bacon or chopped up hamburg or venison chunks in a 2nd  large dutch oven. For the bacon, I cooked it till light brown but not hard. The hamburg I cooked probably about 90 percent done, and I did the same for the venison. I just wanted to brown up those meats, plus I didn’t want the hamburg to clump together into one big mass as it could do during processing.
5. I used a slotted spoon to scoop the bacon, hamburg or venison out onto a dish on which I’d put a paper towel to absorb extra grease
6. I kept about 3 tablespoons of the grease in the dutch oven and added the garlic and onions,
7. cooking the onions for about 10 minutes until they got soft, and by then I had stopped crying from the onions. 
8. In my favorite Texas ware bowl,  I put the chicken stock, brown sugar, molasses, ketchup, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard, sea salt, cayenne pepper flakes and black pepper and mixed them together well.
9. By now the beans were done so I drained them and then I put them back into the first dutch oven, and added the meat, stirring well, heating it all for about 5 minutes just to get everything warm.
10. This is when I heated my jars in the oven at 225 degrees for about fifte