Canning Red Beans

July 21, 2020 Leave a comment

A gal had a family recipe that she wished to try to can. The idea of figuring out how to convert from a standard recipe to a recipe that would be divided across several jars and still be worthwhile was a bit daunting. She asked if I’d be willing to take on doing so and let her know what I found out while doing it.

Here are the results – with a couple of learning moments.

First – the Original Recipe

  • 2lbs / 907.2g smoked sausage, diced
  • 1lb / 453.59g dried, red kidney beans
  • 1/2lb / 226.8g smoked hog jowl
  • 5 slices of bacon
  • 5 ribs of celery
  • 200oz / 5.68 kg chicken broth
  • 1 cup / 226.8ml water
  • 1 bell pepper, diced
  • 1 large onion, diced
  • 4 tsp / 19.7g garlic, minced
  • 1 tsp / 4.93g black pepper
  • 3/4 tsp / 3.7g ground red pepper

Soak the beans overnight. Drain and rinse well. In large stock pot, saute bacon. Remove from pot and brown sausage in bacon drippings. Remove sausage. Saute garlic and vegetables until tender. Stir in beans, crumbled bacon and remaining ingredients. Bring to boil then simmer 3-4 hours until beans are tender. Remove hog jowl before serving. Serve over cooked rice.

So – not so much with the dicing when you’re pressure canning – and, yes, this was pressure canned as the people involved are in the USA where pressure canning is a thing. 🙂

Obviously, bell peppers and, especially, celery are not going to hold up in the PC if they are diced. So – dicing is right out. And, well…there were a few other changes along the way. So – here’s what we have.

Now for my version

Ingredients – K’s style
  • 2lbs / 907.2g smoked Cajun style sausage, sliced
  • 1lb / 453.59g dried, red kidney beans
  • 1/2lb / 226.8g smoked hog shank, chopped
  • 5 slices of bacon
  • 5 ribs of celery
  • 400oz / 11.3 kg chicken bone broth
  • 1 cup / 226.8ml water (or less)
  • 1 bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 3 fresh red, hot peppers, diced
  • 4 tsp / 19.7g garlic, minced
  • 1 tsp / 4.93g black pepper

Yeah – that’s a lot of broth and it wasn’t intended; but, my silly self decided to divide this into seven quarts (liters) instead of packing it heavily into five quarts. If you like it more like a soup, this works out great. Or, if you want to cook your rice in the broth, you can drain the broth from the jar, cook the rice in it and then add the solids to the cooked rice and broth. I actually like the latter option. Otherwise, cut that broth in half and pack heavily into five quarts and you’re good.

Moving on…

The first thing is to soak the beans….I don’t know about you; but, I didn’t want to wait all night, so I did a quick soak. This involves bringing the water to a boil, going for 2 min and then letting sit for an hour. Works a treat.
**Note: Those of you who have never done dried beans before – you will need to rinse them thoroughly before putting them in the pot. Go through them carefully and look for pebbles. No, I’m not having you on – seriously, look for pebbles. It is very unpleasant if you do not.
While the beans are soaking, get started on prepping your other ingredients. Slice the bacon into decent sized bits and toss them into a cool cast iron pan (if you have one – if not, any ol’ pan will do).
Saute the bacon until it’s nice and brown. Move the bits around regularly to keep them from sticking or burning.
While the bacon is sauteing, slice the sausage. Now, you can saute the sausage in the bacon grease if you want. I didn’t. Mostly because I was being a lazy git, more than any other reason. You’ll get a bit more flavour with the saute; but, it’s certainly not necessary.
Well, my brilliant self failed to get a photo of the celery; but, you get an idea how big the chopped pieces are by the size of the bell peppers and onions, here. Same goes for the invisible celery.
Now, I live with a man who is more hummingbird than human. He has a sweet tooth that won’t quit and zero tolerance for spicy anything. As such, I scrape the seeds out of hot peppers and I keep the amount fairly low.
If I were making this just for me? I’d probably have at least tripped the amount of peppers and left the seeds in – so…yeah. That’s to say, this is a very mild version of red beans.
Crank the heat to your own satisfaction by adding more peppers and feel free to chuck in some powdered chili powder – it won’t hurt a thing.
By now, your bacon is ready to come out of the skillet. So, pull it out and lay it on a towel to drain and toss your minced garlic into the hot skillet. You want the aroma to release and be all of the awesome that garlic is but, you don’t want your garlic to brown, so keep an eye on it. When it gets nice and aromatic, pull it out of the bacon grease (I used a pair of mini-tongs) and set it aside. You really don’t want to just leave it here for the next step because we want to be sure we get an even distribution of ingredients in the jars when we can.
We really want all that bacony goodness in the jars with everything else, so we are going to use some of that bone broth and deglaze the skillet. Deglazing is when you take a liquid and pour it into the hot skillet. Then scrape up all the nummy bits that have cooked onto the skillet. Yes, I have some garlic I didn’t get out of there – don’t judge.
At this point, the beans are ready to strain and everything is just waiting on the ham shank…and, hey, look – there’s the mysterious celery that really did get chopped. And, about a quarter of the broth we’ll wind up using.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the beans have been drained as they’re sitting there all sassy in their colander making a point of drawing attention to the fact that I failed to mention a step.
Now, you’re going to take that ham shank and put it in a pot with the broth and the drippings we got from deglazing the skillet. Let it simmer for about an hour in the broth so that its flavour really kicks in.
Seriously, the next time I make this, I’m going to double up on the ham shank.
Once you’ve got the shank out of the broth, you’re going to want to debone it, get the gristle off of it and otherwise look it over for bits that just won’t be to tasty.
My dogs appreciate this step.
Leave the broth on the heat at a nice simmer.
Now, chop that shank up so that it is in tasty, bite size pieces and get ready to start putting stuffs and things into jars.
I measured the ingredients and then divided by seven so I knew how much had to go into each jar…and, yes, I measured as I put them into each jar (well, not the red peppers).
Now, I did this; but, you can certainly just eyeball the proportions and get it close enough.
Start with the beans, then the sausage, bacon and ham shank.
Ignore the mess in the background.
Once you have the proteins into the jar, add the veggies and spices – again, eyeballing proportions is fine. Now, if you’ve gone the five quart option, you’re way packed and probably trying to smash some down into the jars. Right on. Me? I was going seven quarts cuz that’s how I roll.
So – you can see I’m about 3/4 of a quart jar full (liter jar for the Weck users out there).
**Note: I’m assuming you are all conversant with standard safety practices and if you are not that you will educate yourself in such. This is to say – your stuff needs to be sterilized before you’re using it, and keep it clean. No dropsies.
Now, take that hot broth and pour it over the bits in the jar. You will notice that I left a little more headspace than you generally would for soups and such. I do this same thing when I do ham and beans. It just really helps to make sure that I don’t get siphoning; and, honestly, it helps to ensure that if the beans still have more expanding to do, they have the room to do it.
They shouldn’t but – well, yeah.
You will process this at 90 minutes at the proper pressure for your altitude.
For me, that’s 11 PSI.
If you don’t know your altitude – you can find it by doing a search online for “[your address] elevation”.
Once you know your altitude, the National Center for Home Food Preservation has references. Or, you can use the table found on Healthy Canning or other sites.
Always go with the longest timed ingredient; though, to be frank, given how little meat there is in this and how much broth….well, I won’t go into that – I’d likely get myself in trouble.
Now, our 90 minutes (yes, it really was 90 minutes) have passed and the jars are now out of the canner and our seals should be pinging. We see bubbling away as the ingredients are still literally boiling. Let this cool for 24 hours and check those seals. Then clean the jars. there was no siphoning so that was a quick and easy job.
I recommend removing the rings and labeling with the name and at least month and year.
Now…if you are just canning – you’re done. Me? I had to check out how everything held up for the gal who was nervous about trying the recipe. So….moving on….
Black rice – we love it. You can see how soupy it is if you go with the seven quarts. I actually kind of liked it – perfect for soaking corn bread in. But, even so, next time around, I’ll be doing less than seven quarts.
As for consistency, the celery is like most canned celery. It held its form, as you can see; but, it is very soft. About as soft as it’d be cooking for 4 hours at a simmer, so there’s that. The same goes for the beans
I am not a salt person; but, I felt this could have benefited from some salt, so will likely add it going forwards.

Final verdict?

The picky mister gave it his blessing. Ate the whole bowl down and enjoyed it.
The grandson gives it two thumbs up.

So, overall, we’ll take this as a win with some minor tweaks for the next time around. It was a very fun day working on this and I think I will have to work on doing more of the same.

If you give this a try, let me know what tweaks and twists you put on it. I’d be interested in knowing.

Happy canning!

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