Canning Soup – 12 Recipes to Warm Your Belly This Winter (2024)

FAQs

Can homemade soups be canned? ›

Answer: Vegetable, dried bean or pea, meat, poultry or seafood soups can be canned.

Butter, milk, cream, cheese, and other dairy products are low-acid foods that should never be added to home canned soups before processing. Add butter and milk to soup just before serving. Products high in starch also interfere with heat processing.

Place the pot on the stovetop over medium heat. Stir the soup occasionally to prevent sticking and ensure even heating. Heat the soup until it reaches your desired temperature. This usually takes about 5-10 minutes.

Filling room temp jars with hot liquid is fine. But don't put hot liquids into cold jars, nor should you take piping hot just-filled jars and pop them immediately in the freezer. Let them cool a tad on the counter, then chill in the fridge, and pop them in the freezer the next day.

Making your own soup takes time, but it gives you complete control over the ingredients and how you prepare them. Homemade soup can also save you money compared to canned soup. Cook a large batch of soup, then freeze small portions for meals that you can heat quickly.

Meat and beans must be cooked thoroughly before canning

That's because the liquid content in the jar isn't enough to cook the meat or beans contained within it. For soup recipes with meat, cover the meat with water and heat it until it's tender and cooked through.

As long as the can is in good shape, the contents should be safe to eat, although the taste, texture and nutritional value of the food can diminish over time. Home canned foods should be used within 1 year.

Butter, milk, cream, cheese and other dairy products are low acid foods that should never be home canned. Again, add butter and milk to soup just before serving.

The instruction on the tin always used to say do not boil as it will effect the flavour, it is very difficult to heat soup in a microwave without boiling it. Heat in a saucepan is much more controllable and much easier to prevent boiling. Therefore heating soup on the hob is likely to give the soup a better flavour.

Can you warm up soup in the can? ›

Canned food should not be cooked in the can, as doing so can release harmful chemicals from the can and plastic lining into the food. Cans made of tin, aluminum, steel, and other metals can release toxins such as chromium and nickel when heated.

Go green: Add some spinach or chopped kale or pesto. Get zesty: A squirt of lemon juice or zest could brighten up an otherwise flat soup. Starchy things: Homemade croutons, crushed tortilla chips, or oyster crackers. Clean out the fridge: got cooked beans or rice, a dollop of sour cream, or a splash of heavy cream?

Fill the pressure canner with one to two inches of water and get that warming up on the stove. Next, take the hot soup and ladle it into hot jars. Keeping mason jars in the oven on the lowest temperature until ready to use is an easy way to keep your jars warm until ready to use. Fill the soup up to 1-inch headspace.

Use mason jars for quick-heat items like pre-cooked pasta, soup, cheese dips and other products that only require a few minutes to heat. If your company packages freezable products in mason jars, disclaimers should be included that inform consumers not to thaw them in the microwave.

It's important to warm up mason jars specifically because they're thick and sturdy. Glass doesn't conduct heat well, so when you pour hot liquid into a jar, the inside heats and expands. The outside doesn't get as hot though, so if the inside expands too far, the entire vessel will shatter.

Long-term storage of soup would require pressure canning to raise the internal temperature high enough to kill any foodborne illnesses. If you plan to freeze the soup then mason jars aren't ideal, they'll work but they are bulky and take up a lot of room.

Fill canning jars halfway with solids from the soup mixture. Continue filling jars with hot liquid from the soup mixture, leaving 1" headspace. Process in a pressure canner. Use 11 pounds pressure for dial-gauge canner or 15 pounds pressure for weighted-gauge canner.

Properly frozen soup in mason jars can last in the freezer for up to 3 months. However, for optimal taste and quality, it is recommended to consume the soup within 1 to 2 months. Make sure to label the jars with the date, so you can keep track of their freezing time.

Caution: Soups contain low-acid ingredients and cannot be safely canned in a boiling water bath or an atmospheric steam canner. Soups must be processed in a pressure canner.