Low Acid Recipes
 

I understand how important it is to follow directions and recipes when you are using a "Boiling Water Canner"


But what about when using a "Steam Pressure Canner"?

is following the recipe to the "t" as vital?

I'm talking about [B]ingredients[/B] and not altering cooking times or weighted gages

I'm looking in my Ball Blue book and I see everything from stew meat to squirrel ( /puke )

The stew meat i just canned today had no vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid added. Just stew meat.
I followed the recipe to the letter.

next I want to can chicken soup, my 7 year old takes a thermos to school for lunch almost every day.
Progresso I believe ..I tasted it the other day and frankly..it's crap.
I plan on making the chicken soup found in the blue book.
I'll start with homemade stock.

It's a simple recipe
4qts chicken stock
3 cups chicken (seems a bit skimpy)
1 1/2 cups diced celery
1 1/2 cups sliced carrots
1 cup diced onion

I still have leeks in the garden, can I use those?
can i add more chicken? the last thing i want to do is poison my kid for crying out loud.

Are recipes like this and say ...the one for meat sauce for spaghetti in the book because this how you have to do it or are they there because someone may not know how to make chicken soup or spaghetti sauce.

Now I know these were tested and I honestly don't expect Ball to print every possible variation of a recipe...meat sauce alone would be as big as a phone book.

But I would like to can my mothers spaghetti sauce.
I have made the Ball's and it was so so.
I do note that the Ball's has 2 tlb vinegar (oddly the squirrel has none) I would be willing to add this to my Mom's when making the same volume if it were necessary for PH reasons.

What are your thoughts?

Well, a couple of things.

I prefer to freeze soup rather than can it, especially if it is intended for lunch boxes. One reason is that I can put it up in individual serving sized containers. When it is time to pack the lunch, it is an easy matter to throw a single container at the microwave to thaw and reheat it for those who have to carry it hot, or just throw the entire container into the lunchbag (acts as the ice) for those who have a microwave available.

Oddly enough, while I can tomatoes and salsa, I freeze spaghetti sauce and likely would continue to do so even if I had a pressure canner available.

I was lucky enough to learn to can from my Grandma and one of the things that she took pains to teach me was the economics of canning. So, if you raise a couple of bushels of green beans more than your family can eat, then it makes good sense to put them up in some way for the winter. On the other hand, if you have to go buy those green beans by the bushel to can, you are losing money in a big way.

Since I have a large garden rather than a farm, having a pressure canner just has never made much sense to me. Most of what I do, have or ever would can can be safely done in a water bath.

RE Ball's, I have been very unhappy with the recipes that I have seen from them lately, starting with the fact that the Freezing & Canning Cookbook my daughter brought home has high fructose corn syrup in an awful lot of stuff included in the book. One of the reasons I can is specifically to avoid that crap!

You are correct that the vinegar is being added for a pH issue - "modern" tomatoes like you would buy at the grocery are low acid. If you buy yourself a pH meter, you only need to acidify your tomato stuff if the pH is greater than 4.50.

Re that particular Chicken Soup recipe, it seems a bit SMALL to me. That looks like the amount of chicken soup I would make for a meal for 4 people. It seems to me that canning such a small amount would be an awful lot of work for very little return.

Have you tried looking for other Chicken Soup for canning recipes online?

Yes, soups can be canned - here's a link to the guidelines from the Canning Police :P at the University of Georgia.

[URL]http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_04/soups.html[/URL]

I've tried chicken soup both ways - pressure canned and frozen. Since I filled the jars half with vegetables and half with stock per the instructions, I thought it didn't have enough vegetables in it (I like my soup "chunky", so I ended up having to make more vegetables to throw into it). I also find we prefer the taste and texture of frozen soups over canned soups, and freezing seems to take less time and effort - at least for me.

Since it was something like -153 degrees together (okay, it felt like it!) I think Bully was just getting cabin fever and wanted to play with his new toy (pressure canner) :twisted:

That recipe does seem on the small side to make the process worthwhile, but I can appreciate wanting to make a nice soup vs. a Campbells or Progresso. Homemade chicken soup is so easy and so much better than store bought. Everytime I make some...it is one of the very few things I make that I do this..but as I am eating it...I am thinking to myself....Dang this is good...Okay, sometimes I say it out loud too!:D


There is just something so satisfying about homemade chicken noodle soup.

Duane

bully,

my thoughts are, ingredients can be tweaked. the main concern would be adding something that required a longer processing time then low acid foods such as seafood, mentioned in the site that morgan provided. we mostly freeze here due to time, and we have a lot of freezer space. home made soup beats canned soup for sure. canned is way too salty now for my tastes. unless we make a double recipe, soup usually doesn't make it to the freezer here. ;)

keith in calumet

I have canned almost everything in a pressure canner, including turkey and chicken meat, pork, soups, salsas etc...

The acid in the wather bath method is necessary to kill the botulism bacteria. In non-acid food, whatever it is, the 240'f attained in a pressure canner does the job. To err on the safe side if in doubt, cook it longer than the recipe calls for.