Pressure Canning ~ Delight or Disaster?

Yeah, we’ve started making our homemade soup…finally.  This has been a plan of ours since we started canning again full-time this summer in July…and, we are just getting around to it now.  I guess better late than never.  Our original plan was to make enough soup to be able to enjoy a bowl each every day for a year.  Now, that is a lot of soup.  My mom kindly purchased all the jars for what we will call “operation soup” and gave them to us as a birthday gifts…The making and canning of the soup is up to us!

All soups must be pressure canned in order for them to be safely preserved.  And, well I am very confident using the hot water bath method for our pickles, jams, chutneys, fruit, etc…I am a little uneasy around the pressure canner.  No, I’m not afraid that the lid will blow off or that there will be an explosion…I just simply have not used it enough to feel the same level of confidence that Matt does.  You have to remember until last year I didn’t even know how to turn on the stove let alone follow a recipe from start to finish.  I am  still a work in progress.  So, I’ve been waiting until Matt has a few spare moments, more like hours, to help me put up some soup.  Okay we’re ready…he’s going to take a day off work.  We have a great brand new pressure canner, all of the jars we need to make about 300-400 litres of soup and lots of access to root vegetables and other delicious soup making ingredients.  Sounds delightful…doesn’t it!?!  And, better still, we all know there is nothing like the taste of a hot bowl of homemade soup on a cold winters day…right!?!  This plan of our almost sounds too good to be true.

Let’s make soup!  Soup is one of those things that you can really experiment with and there are tons of tried, tested and true recipes out there.  Matt has been making homemade soup for years and we’ve always enjoyed it.  But, having several kinds of homemade soup ready-made and jarred is an extra bonus and something we really thought would work well with our lifestyle.  If you don’t want to wing it, there are lots of great soup making recipe books out there and we’ve enjoyed all of the soups we’ve made from Sunday Soup by Betty Rosbottom and New England Soup Factory Cookbook by Marjorie Druker and Clara Silverstein.

Our first soup of the season recipe comes from Sunday Soup and is Betty’s Russian Vegetable Soup.  This recipe was selected because it called for cabbage, one of the veggies that is readily available in Ontario right now and we just happened to have 3 huge heads of savoy cabbage from our friend Suzann.  Perfect.

 RECIPE FOR RUSSIAN VEGETABLE SOUP :

• one 2-pound cabbage, halved lengthwise, cored, and cut into 1-inch thick wedges
• 2 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 1/4″ slices
• 2 ribs celery, cut into 1/2″ thick slices
• 3 medium turnips (12 ounces), peeled and cut into 1″ cubes
• 8 cups beef stock, divided (we used chicken stock because that’s what we made)
• One 6 ounce can tomato paste
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more if needed
• freshly ground black pepper
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 medium onions, peeled, halved lengthwise, and cut into 1/4″ thick slices
• 1 large garlic clove, finely chopped
• 1 large russet potato (12 ounces), peeled and cut into 1″ cubes
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh dill

1. In a large stainless steel stockpot add cabbage, carrots, celery, turnips, and 6 cups of the stock.  Bring to a simmer, then mix in the tomato paste, 1 teaspoon salt, and some freshly ground pepper. Let it cook, uncovered, until the vegetables are very tender, for about 1 1/2 hours.
2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a saucepan.  Once it’s hot, add the onions and sauté until tender approximately 3 to 4 minutes.  Add the garlic and sauté for an additional minute or two.  Remove from heat and set aside.
3. After the vegetables have gurgled away in the stockpot for 11/2 hours, add the onion mixture and the cubed potatoes.  Pour in the remaining 2 cups stock.  The vegetables should be submerged.  Note:  if there isn’t enough liquid to cover the vegetables, add 1 to 2 cups water to cover them.  Cook until the potatoes are just tender but not breaking up, about 30 minutes.  Season soup to taste with additional salt and pepper. 
4. Ladle the hot soup into the sterilized jars, leaving 1″ headspace at the top. Note: sterilizing the jars is not necessary but we’ve gotten into the habit of doing it and this way your jars are also extra clean and nice and hot too.)   Use a damp paper towel to wipe the rims of the jars, then put a flat lid and ring on each jar, adjusting the ring so that it’s just finger-tight.  Place the jars in the pressure canner and follow the pressure canning directions for your area.   We pressure canned the soup for 60 minutes.
5. Serve the soup with a dollop of sour cream or freshly grated sharp cheese, and a spot of chopped dill.

Now, the making of the soup was delightful.  Matt and I spent a wonderful afternoon in the kitchen watching the fruits of our labour simmering on the stove…sneaking a sample spoon throughout the process and determining that once again Mrs. Rosbottom knows how to make a great bowl of soup.   But, you can’t forget that after spending 2 1/2 to 3 hours making the soup your ventures in the kitchen are not over.  It still has to be put in the pressure canner for another 6o minutes…and, we had more than one load of jars to process because we tripled the recipe (we had 1 double batch and 1 single batch simmering away).  Making soup to jar is a labour of love and we do it because it is healthier and tastier than anything you’ll buy at the store.  But, after spending most of the day in front of a hot stove all you want to hear once the jars are removed is that pop, pop, pop sound as they happily seal themselves and await the day when they will be opened and served.  We waited and waited a little longer because pressure canned jars are hotter, and we waited some more for that popping sound.  But, it didn’t come for all of the jars.  And, the last thing you want after spending 4 plus hours working on 7 litres of soup is to have jars that DO NOT seal.  Sadness and frustration instantly sets in and you wonder why are you doing this!?! 

And, that my friends is the disaster.  Matt and I spend so much of our time canning, making bread, and preparing deliciously healthy homemade meals that we cannot afford to spend extra time reprocessing our jars.   Let alone re-pressure canning our jars (more time).  And, that is what happened with our first batch of soup.  Two-thirds of our jars did not seal ~ four jars from our first batch were reprocessed and two jars from our second and last batch did not seal…we’re just going to eat them.  AGGGHHH, frustrating!!!  

The worst part is we don’t really know why.  We know that we’ve never had as much success pressure canning as we have had using the boiling water bath and the added and extra time involved in pressure canning leaves us scratching our heads.  We also know that we have a siphoning problem and that the jars that did not seal had too many particles that had siphoned preventing any kind of seal.  But, what do we do to fix this problem? and turn our soup making disaster into pure delight!?!

Solutions?…Anyone?  We think that we are going to leave them in the pressure canner to cool for a bit longer and see if that helps.  Afterall, this is why you wait the 5 minutes before removing your jars after boiling in the regular water bath to give them time to cool and prevent siphoning.  Maybe this is the answer…but we still are not sure.

Our “operation soup” will continue and I will keep you updated…358 litres to go.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Put up Total:

• 9 x 1 litre regular mouth mason jars  (Note: 2 are unsealed and will be refrigerated)