Beef Stew

Waaaaay back sometime ago, I said I was going to let you know how canning beef stew turned out. Well, it turned out okay. Alright, I will just say it, the stew was really blah. Not something you would just dump out of the jar and heat. It definitely needed more seasonings or flavor of some sort.The "stew" ended up being more of a soup or pot pie base. Having the "stew" canned has been pretty handy though.

What I did was take a roast that was a tougher cut and cubed it into roughly 1 1/2 - inch cubes. I next gathered up a bunch of little new potatoes, home grown carrots, and little onions (about the size of a rubber bouncy ball). These were washed and some of the larger potatoes and carrots were cut in half so that they were all a fairly uniform size. The onions were just peeled and left whole. I would have put whole garlic cloves in but ours weren't ready yet, so I used minced garlic instead. I didn't measure out the meat and vegetables. Another super technical way was used to achieve the right amount. Just kidding, I added potatoes and carrots were until I thought it looked like the right ratio of meat to vegetables. The recipe(Beef Stew with vegetables in the Ball Blue Book guide to home canning) I was kind of going by called for celery but most in our family do not care for it in their stew, so celery was omitted.

Now for what I did with the ingredients.

• The meat was browned in a little oil.
• Vegetables were added to the meat and both were seasoned with salt and pepper.
• Meat and vegetables were then covered with boiling water*
• Then the stew was brought to a boil.

The hot stew was then ladled into hot jars leaving a 1-inch head space. I processed the quarts for 1 hour and 15 minutes at 10 pounds pressure in a steam-pressure canner.

That's it. Although it didn't end up being as stew like as I wanted it wasn't that bad. It just needed a bit more flavor.

*Once I had everything ready to cook I realized that I had way more than what would fit in our largest skillet. I ended up doing the stew in about three batches and dumping each batch into a stock pot then bringing to a boil.

- Not of This World