Beans

Are you enjoying all of these canning posts?  Sorry, I'm a bit obsessed with canning as of late and I think everyone else should be too.  It really isn't hard and once you get the hang of it, it is really simple and you see the benefits of having all of these ready to go meals.  My friend and I set aside 3 days last week to get 75 lbs of beans canned.  We had 25lbs of each, black, pinto and northern beans.  Folks, that's a whole lotta beans.  Here's what my half looked like in jars.  12 quarts and 26 pints of pinto beans, 9 quart and 26 pints of northern, 5 quarts and 36 pints of black beans.  Each bean I ended up running my pressure canner 3 times in a day.  Each batch is around 3 hours when you add up time to steam, time for weight to rock and then you start your 75-90 minute time under pressure and then it has to cool for about an hour before you can take the lid off.  Then the process starts over again.  One thing to remember when canning beans is to NEVER add any salt.  You can only salt your beans when you go to use them.  If you salt them at anytime during the canning process your beans will not soften.  This goes for cooking them from a dry state as well.  We did add some bacon, bell pepper, onion and some garlic.  For the black beans we also added some jalapeño to some of the jars.

Here are 2 more things we learned during this process.  Everything about canning says to cook the beans for 30 - 60 minutes before canning them after soaking them all night (changing the water once) I will never do this again because the beans got a bit overcooked for my taste.  Second, I will not fill the jars as full either.  The panic of just how many jars and batches it was going to take made us overfill the jars leaving no room for expansion.  They are still good, however we got beans splitting and they don't slide out of the jar as well as your store bought canned beans do.  This really doesn't matter on the pinto because they are turning into refried beans anyway, but the black and the northern you want "pretty" beans for.  So again, lesson learned.

The pic with the northern beans has a chocolate no-bake cookie that I was holding.  I made them with my scout troop the night before and I was on my 4th one that day.  The northern was my last day of bean canning and I was beginning to feel like I had entered the 7th level of bean hell by this time.  My sanity was hanging on my consumption of cookies and I needed to be saved from myself.  Luckily because we did such large batches I would say that only every couple years we need to do it so it was well worth the time investment.  I think we figured that each jar was about 16 cents, again not including the investment of jars....which only added 50 cents to the price, so still significantly cheaper than the store and better for you.  One last piece of advice.  If you decide to buy a pressure canner, go low tech (weights not gauges) and go big.  My friend can't double stack in hers so the process really slows down when you have to do more batches.  We only used hers for quarts because it was a waste to run it with pints and mine we were able double stacked pints in.  If I could get my hands on an industrial sized one and perhaps a warehouse that would be even better :0)