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| Hi guys, I am new to canning and am super cautious!!! I would like to can a particular recipe that I have been freezing for years but am not sure how to go about finding out if it can be canned safely. Is there someone who knows how to check a recipe and tell me if it can be canned, if so for how long and at what pressure?? It is a butternut squash with great northern bean soup recipe. I would really love to hear from you if you can help me. Thank you, Sandy |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| If your butternut squash is pureed, than it can't be home canned. If it is in chunks, then it might be OK. The criteria for soups are a) they have to be pressure canned - do you have a pressure canner? and b) the jars have to contain 50% solids and 50% liquid. If your bean soup is anything like my DH's, it's thick enough to almost stand a spoon up in it. That couldn't be canned, so we freeze it. If you post the recipe, that would give us more info. |
Here is a link that might be useful: How to Can Soups
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| Canning home recipes is sooooo dangerous. They have not been tested for approval and not recommended at all. Maybe find an approved basic ingredient recipe to can and then add your other special stuff when reheating. |
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| Given time, any food with any solid to liquid ration can be pressure canned. It just take longer time for heat penetration into solids. Have you boiled potatoes on stove top ? It takes longer time for bigger potatoes to cook. Smaller ones, cut one cook faster. In a pressure cooker or canner with higher temperatures, heat penetration takes place at much faster rate than on stove top( higher delta T). That is why you can cook the toughest meat in a pressure cooker in about 1/3 of time. So the point is that, any food can be pressure canned. Because somebody has not tested it, does not mean that you cannot do it. |
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| A thick puree like bean or squash soup could be considered the same as pumpkin butter. USDA says there's too much variation in vicosity and pH (and soup doesn't even have much sugar in it which would help the water activity in a butter) so they can't come up with a process time to recommend for everyone. If you always made your soup/butter the same and got it tested a food scientist could possibly come up (after experimentation and instrumentation with thermocouples to measure the coldest spots in the jars) with a process time, but if you changed the jar size, shape, or the recipe at all it would be negated. Even the pH of the vegetables could vary from year to year or location to location (so if you bought some squash from 1 farmer and some from another they could differ in pH, since in a 1995 study pumpkin butters made by the same formulation differed). Just because something theoretically CAN be done doesn't mean that we know HOW to do it. If trained food scientists can't come up with a safe 'one-size-fits-all' process time after decades of testing, how is a home canner supposed to? |
Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP pureed squash paper
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| If the beans are not pureed, and it's just a few beans and chunks of squash (half the jar is solids) in water or broth (half the jar) you could can it as malna said, but it might be more prudent to use the cubed winter squash (15 minutes longer) rather than the soup processing time. You can puree the soup when you open the jar to reheat it. But a recipe would be good - I'm hoping Dave will pop in and look at it. |
Here is a link that might be useful: Canning winter squash
This post was edited by ajsmama on Tue, Sep 23, 14 at 7:40
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