Something New!

This week I ventured into the low-acid territory of pressure-canned beef stock!  I've made stock and broth and soup before, no problem, but have never canned it.  Recently the farm family who we purchase our grassfed beef from gave us the soup bones from a cow they had butchered as they didn't have the space and the desire to use it themselves. Wow!  Free soup bones from a grassfed, humanely treated animal!  Huge score!  We are running low on freezer space and I loved the idea of having soup stock all ready to go, so...I did it! 

I followed the Ball Blue Book recipe, but rather than simmering the bones and veggies on the stove, I decided to let it cook up in the Nesco roaster, out in the breezeway.  No scent lingering in the house that way, and no flame to watch over.  It worked out well.  It cooked out there for about16 hours, as a nice long cook time is said to concentrate the flavor nicely and pull out much of the nutritious marrow.  The batch calls for 4 lbs of bones and is supposed to yield about four pints of beef stock.  Well, in my book, four pints is nuthin'.  I figure if I'm going to go to all that effort, I want a lot more than four dinky jars.  So, I doubled the recipe, using eight lbs of bones.

End result:  lovely, gelatinous (translation:  really good stuff) stock.  Unfortunately, though, I still only ended up with four pressure canned pints...plus one pint which didn't seal (destined for the freezer) and one nearly-full pint which we used as a base for 16-bean soup the next day. 

Lessons learned: 
1.  Use the stock pot next time, maybe the use of the roaster was part of the problem in my attempts to double the recipe (not enough space in there for double the water).  And/or just keep to a single batch.
2.  Don't let it boil.  Boiling results in cloudy stock...not a quality issue, but a prettiness issue.
3.  Strain really well.  Use cheesecloth with the strainer to get all the gunk out.  Again, just a cosmetic think, I think.
4.   Find the baster.  It was hard (well, impossible) to ladle off every last bit of fat.  Interrupting the recipe to let the stock cool in the fridge, and allowing the fat to harden so it's easy to remove, would also prevent this issue.  Once more, it's a cosmetic issue.

Despite my complaints and self-criticism, I'm really happy with the results.  Did I mention I made this with two littles at home with me?  I almost never water-bath can without Brian to help with the kids, and have never pressure-canned without his help in some form or another.  Finally, it's always a feeling of accomplishment to have a new canning recipe under my belt, and four, yes even if it's only four, nore pints of good, nourishing food on the shelves.