Canning Ham & Beans

 

Holidays are great beyond just celebrating holy and other meaningful events in human history.  It’s a time to share meals, gather families and introduce traditions to our new generations.  Beyond that, holiday celebrations come with wonderful sales that allows families, especially those on tight budgets to fill their pantries with inexpensive but delicious food.  Easter is a perfect example of that.  Ham.  There are so many things to cook with ham and making leftovers into soups and stews provides for a variety of options that can feed a family for many months ahead.

First I will share a general recipe I follow.  I cook many things like this without actually measuring.  I did do my best to record what I did this time.  But keep in mind that this is a base recipe and you can add any other kinds of ingredients that you prefer.  You may want more carrots or you may want to add other vegetables.  Maybe you have a special spice that you want to add.  Do it!  The canning process will be the same.  Make it the way your family loves.

Canning Ham & Beans

Recipe Type: Soup

Cuisine: American

Author: PrepperPenny

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 90 mins

Total time: 2 hours

Serves: LOTS

Cut all ingredients into similar size pieces

Ingredients

• 4 Pounds Dry White Beans
• 3 Pounds of Baked Ham, cut into similarly sized pieces
• 4 Tbsp Chicken Bouillon (Optional)
• 5 Stalks of Celery
• 2 Medium Size Yellow Onions
• 5 Large Carrots
• Salt & Pepper To Taste
• 4 Bay Leaves
• Smoked Paprika to add smokey flavor
• Dried Parsley
• Celery Salt

Instructions

1. Clean and soak beans overnight
2. Rinse Beans and return to large stockpot
3. Add all ingredients
4. Cover with water and cook for about an hour before proceeding to pressure canning

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Canning Your Ham & Beans . . . Step-By-Step

Let’s begin with a friendly reminder.  These scraps are perfect to save in the freezer until you have enough to make your own vegetable stock or for making meat and seafood stock.  So never throw them out.  I keep a one gallon ziplock bag in my freezer and am always dropping in all my fresh vegetable scraps.  And yes, the skins from my onions, too!  How about that for free food!

After having cleaned, rinsed and soaked your beans overnight or for several hours, chop your veggies and ham and dump it all into a large stockpot.  Then cover it with water and put onto a low but sustained simmer.

Now is the time to get your jars, rings and lids ready and gather all your canning utensils.  There are a few ways folks clean their jars.  Some run them through the dishwasher.  Personally, I wash everything in hot, soapy water then put into my oven at 200 degrees which gives me confidence that they are as clean and sanitized as possible.  It’s also a habit of mine to run my bare finger across the rim to check for any flaws or chips.  I also give a visual inspection of every jar to be sure there are no cracks or flaws in the jar.  Any jar that shows signs of flaws should be set aside and should never be used for canning.

Canning jars absolutely must be kept warm to receive the hot ingredients.  When I first began canning, I made a terrible mistake by not having them hot enough and had two jars fail (break) in the canner.  Lesson learned.  Now you want to add 2″-3″ of water and begin to heat your pressure canner.

With all things ready, lets begin to can your soup.  Using a ladle and canning funnel, fill your hot jars with a 1″ head space.  Make sure there are no air bubbles lurking in your jar.  Using a plastic spatula, remove any bubbles.  Failing to do so could cause your jar to break in the canner.

I can’t stress enough how important ALL sanitary measures are at every stage in canning.  But making sure you wipe the rims after filling your jars is as crucial as any.  Any trace of food or oil can prevent your jars from sealing, and can (and likely will) cause your food to spoil and go rancid.  When canning anything oily, like meat, I use white vinegar which will satisfactorily remove the oils.

After having your lids and rings warmed in boiling water, carefully remove them and immediately place them on the jars.

Before the wax ring on you lid can cool, place your ring on the jar and tighten it enough to hold the lid in place.  Don’t over tighten the rings.  Simply finger tighten it.  Immediately place your jar into the canner at this point.

Once your canner is filled, place the lid on it and follow your specific canner guidelines and process your jars at 10 pounds of pressure for 75 minutes in pint jars, 90 minutes in quart jars.

Allow the pressure in your canner to completely dissipate before trying to remove the pressure weight.  Once the pressure is zero, you may remove the lid.  However, everything is still very hot!  Please use proper caution and care.

Using a canning jar lifter, remove your jars from your canner and gently place them onto a towel and carefully tighten the rings.  Leave your jars to cool for at least 10 hours.  When you remove your jars, you will see they are still boiling.  This is normal.  You will begin to hear that heavenly confirmation that all canners love so much.  The ping.  That is the indication that your jars are sealing properly.  Don’t be discouraged if one or more does not seal.  It sometimes happens.

Once your cans have set and cooled (usually overnight), remove the rings and test the seals.  As indicated above, you can test by sound by tapping a spoon on the lid (I have never done that), give a physical inspection looking to see if the raised nipple has con caved.  It is quite easy to see if a lid hasn’t sealed because the nipple will protrude if it didn’t seal properly.  If you are not quite sure, press on the center of the lid.  It should not give and should be hard.  I always pick up my jars by the very top rim.  If the lid isn’t sealed, it will pull off the jar.  If this happens, you can put your contents into a container and either refrigerate it and eat it within a few days, or freeze it for later use.

Now you will want to wash each jar with hot, soapy water, add your label with the content and date you canned it.

This batch I just canned wound up yielding 14 jars.  To help protect them, I put my jars back into the box they came out of.  Notice here, when I opened this box, I cut off the top of the plastic wrap leaving the bottom of it intact over the box.  If one of your jars happens to break or leak without you noticing it, the plastic will save you from having an even bigger mess.