Day: December 31, 2016

The bone broth is finished. I strained it twice and put it all in a stock pot. I added water until I had a total of 5 quarts of liquid for the soup. Next I began to chop. It didn’t take as long as I had thought it. I chopped up 3 cups of carrots, 3 cups of celery, one cup of onion, and picked off all of the meat from my chicken thighs that I used for the bone broth. I got 4 cups of meat.

The bowl on the upper right is holding my strained vegetables and meat from the bone broth. I just pulled out the big pieces and put it in a bowl in the fridge overnight. The meat was easy to get off, and I was really surprised at how little of the chicken became waste.

It was time to fill the jars. I followed a recipe from the Amish Canning Cookbook,  putting more meat and vegetables in than the recipe called for. The recipe said that it had a lot of broth so that you could add noodles and cook it right in the soup. I prefer to make my noodles separately so that all of my broth from the soup remains, so I filled them more. It was so easy, about 1 cup of raw carrots, 1 cup of celery, 1/2 cup of onion and 1 cup of chicken meat was put in a hot jar.

It was obvious pretty early on that I would need more vegetables. So I ended up chopping up the rest of the carrots and celery that I had bought, and another small onion. I added the hot broth to the jar, leaving one inch headspace, used the tool to get out all of the air bubbles, wiped the rim with vinegar to remove any meat oils, and put on the lid and band. Back into the pressure canner it went until all of the quart jars were filled. This recipe made 5 quarts with enough soup leftover for us to eat for lunch, which was good because the family had been smelling it all day and they wanted some!

     

I processed them in the pressure canner following the manufacturer’s directions (adding 3 quarts of water and 2 Tablespoons of vinegar to the canner.) Once the canner had vented for 10 minutes, I set the 15 pound pressure regulator on top and waited for the jiggle. My altitude requires 15 pounds of pressure.  I then processed it for 90 minutes, turned off the heat, and waited for it to return to pressure before opening the lid.

While it cooked, we ate the leftovers!