Canning Green Beans
Michael Poché
onions for hours. I am NEVER buying Delmonte again.
Is it possible to cook a large quantity and canned them in pint jars for
furture use?
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Michael Poché
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Grandma
"Michael Poché" <mpo...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:B823C547.A0E3%mpo...@yahoo.com...
> I had the best green beans yesterday, fresh cooked with a ham hock and
> onions for hours. I am NEVER buying Delmonte again.
>
> Is it possible to cook a large quantity and canned them in pint jars for
> furture use?
> --
Only if you use a pressure canner - and they are NOT the same. Nothing
beats fresh green beans. Good frozen ones are acceptable. Dilly beans are
nice if you like pickles. Otherwise, forget it and just eat them in season
:)
zxcvbob
Grandma wrote:
>
> "Michael Poché" <mpo...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:B823C547.A0E3%mpo...@yahoo.com...
> > I had the best green beans yesterday, fresh cooked with a ham hock and
> > onions for hours. I am NEVER buying Delmonte again.
> >
> > Is it possible to cook a large quantity and canned them in pint jars for
> > furture use?
> > --
>
> Only if you use a pressure canner - and they are NOT the same. Nothing
> beats fresh green beans...
But home canned beans can come pretty close.
> ...Good frozen ones are acceptable. Dilly beans are
> nice if you like pickles. Otherwise, forget it and just eat them in season
> :)
I prefer home canned beans to commercial frozen beans. You add the bacon
when you heat them, you don't can them with hamhocks. I do buy frozen
french cut beans just for stirfrying.
Commercial canned beans? Blech! :-P
Best regards,
Bob
Michael Poché
11/24/01 1:58 AM:
So what's the technique?
zxcvbob
I haven't canned any for about 3 years, so my memory of the details is a
little fuzzy. But you just snap the fresh beans and pack them in quart
jars with water and salt and pressure process them for the prescribed
long time (details are in Ball Blue Book, or are available from the
USDA). The 40 minutes or so that the beans are processed is equivalent
to cooking them for hours.
To serve, drain the bean juice into a saucepan and add a piece of good
bacon or dry salty ham. Boil the bacon in the bean juice for a little
while to give it a head start. Then pour the beans in and add a little
pepper and boil them for 10 minutes.
I can't think of any good reason that home canned beans should be much
different than commercially canned, but they are much better -- they
actually taste and smell like beans. It may have something to do with
the variety of beans you grow in your garden or buy at the farmers
market. It's gotta be a substantial bean that can take the long cooking
without turning to mush.
Best regards,
Bob
Kate Furr
home-grown produce is better: commercial produce is picked when it is under-ripe so
as to survive the (long) shipping times from field to processing plant. Home-grown
is picked when it is perfectly ripe and ready to eat. And as I have learned here,
better produce makes better preserves!
Cheers,
Kate
Blanche Nonken
> It may have something to do with
> the variety of beans you grow in your garden or buy at the farmers
> market.
Almost certainly. The best-tasting beans are pole-beans; the ones that
grow up on a vine and you pick all through the summer. Grow enough
plants and you can do a small-medium sized canning load once or twice a
week.
Commercial varieties are bush-beans. They ripen all at once, and are
perfect for commercial growers - machine harvesting destroys the plants,
but they're done bearing anyway.
Grandma
"zxcvbob" <b...@a51web.net> wrote in message
news:3BFF2E7E...@a51web.net...
Absolutely! BUT - if you have no experience in canning and don't raise a
big garden and are not sure that you have the time and energy to devote to
it, investing $100 or more for a pressure canner in order to put up a few
jars of beans makes for some spendy beans!
I like to encourage folks that have never canned at all or been raised
around it to start with some simple jellies/jams and relishes to get a feel
for the process and some relatively easy experience before they dive into
the pressure canning world.
Michael Poché
wrote on 11/24/01 3:23 AM:
How about freezing the beans after cooking with the ham hock?
Grandma
Easily done - not quite as good as the original but very acceptable. Just
put the "leftovers" into either a freezer/oven proof dish with a tight
fitting lid or just pile them into a ziplock (I like to use 2), seal and
freeze. They'll keep several months that way.
wif...@bright.net
wrote:
why is a pressure canner necessary? I have never done beans before and
was curiuos. I don't use a canner for any of the other canning I do. I
have been freezing my beans.
>:)
>
zxcvbob
You need to use a pressure canner so that the contents of the jars
reaches and maintains 240° F. This temperature is required for killing
the "botulism" spores that might be present, because the beans are not
acid enough to prevent the growth of the spores into toxin producing
clostridium bacteria.
Pickles are acid enough that it doesn't matter if they are contaminated
with the spores (which are in the soil and they contaminate almost
everything and it's no big deal). The acid prevents the spores from
growing.
Jams and jellies are either acid enough to prevent the growth of
clostridium, or the water is so bound up with the sugar that there is
not enough available to support bacterial growth. Jam and jelly will
support the growth of mold and maybe some yeasts, but this spoilage is
usually visually obvious and is seldom dangerous anyway. The reason you
should process your jams and jellies and pickles in a boiling water bath
is to kill the molds and yeasts and non-spore bacteria that might be
present and spoil all that hard work you did.
Best regards,
Bob
Gary Woods
>why is a pressure canner necessary? I have never done beans before and
>was curiuos
Because killing botulism spores need temperatures higher than the "normal"
100C boiling point of water. The pressure allows higher temps to be
reached.
I like frozen green beans much better than canned. Other things like
shelling beans and beets can better, in my humble omnivorous opinion.
Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at www.albany.net/~gwoods
Zone 5/6 in upstate New York, 1200' elevation.
Mowens4955
Recently I bought about 5lbs of string beans. I knew that if I cooked them
and left them in the refridgerator that they would eventually spoil.
Here's what I did. Iremoved the stems,washed them, placed them in boiling
water for a few minutes(blanching).
I then drained them and placed into small freezer bags for the amount I
wanted and freezed it.
When I was ready to cook them, I did and my family stated that that was the
best tasting string beans they had tasted in a long time.
Marlene.
Grandma
<wif...@bright.net> wrote in message
news:bfag0ucv45to65nqa...@4ax.com...
Green beans and all other non-acid vegetables (pretty much any vegetable
that is not tomatoes) along with anything at all that contains meat needs to
be canned under pressure to raise the heat high enough to kill harmful
microbes that might be present.
Pickles, relishes, jams and jellies are all fine in a water bath.
Eric
words prefaced by >> to which I will add some comments.
>>Green beans and all other non-acid vegetables (pretty much any vegetable
>>that is not tomatoes) along with anything at all that contains meat needs to
>>be canned under pressure to raise the heat high enough to kill harmful
>>microbes that might be present.
High enough? That is meaningless to a newbie.
The complete information for pressure canning will include:
Use a tested recipe and process _properly_ for the required time.
The tested recipe will give a pressure which permits temperatures significantly
higher than atmospheric pressure permits.
Newbies need lots of experience in BWB before diving into pressure canning.
Mistakes in pressure canning [ usually due to lack of proper exhausting ] are
not quite as benign as those in BWB.