Canning Dried Beans

I've been wanting to find a way to use dry beans because I want to get away from as much store bought canned products as I can. If I can things myself I know what goes into that jar of food, it doesn't have strange additives, and also doesn't have the coating on the cans, leaching chemicals into my food...except for the lids that is.

I know I won't be able to get away from all of it, but the more I can, the better off we will be. One of these days I hope I can afford to use the reusable canning lids from tattler because they are suppose to be BPA free. They are on my list of things to try, as soon as I can get the money to do so.

Anyway...back to the point of this post. *giggle*

Dried beans are fairly cheap, but knowing me and how disorganized I can be, I know I won't get around to using them all that much, if I don't have them "ready to eat" in a can (or jar) because I never remember to get them soaked and cooked so I can use them.

So when I had a little free time this summer, I googled to see if you could can dried beans. I looked at several different sites, and found several different ideas, but the one that jumped out at me, that I had to try, was the easiest one. (Big DUH I know, I always have to choose the easiest/fastest way to do something. LOL)

Sadly, when I found how to do it, I didn't have time to try it. It was a busy summer around here after all. :)

Last week however, I finally got around to trying it out! I canned up 8 pints, then turned around the next day and used four of them in a big batch of chili and it really worked well!!

Now, as soon as I get time to (probably after Thanksgiving) I'm going to try canning some with spices in them for chili, so all I have to do is add tomato sauce and hamburger for an even easier/faster meal, although I will probably want to still have some plain ones too...so I have them for other dishes if I want them. :)

If you have a pressure canner, you will have to try this, because it sure beats soaking and cooking them every time you want to use them. Least it does to me! :)

To Can Dry Beans:
Printable Recipe*
Wash your jars and sort your beans. You can use most any kind of bean, but this time I used pinto because that's what I had on hand.

Put a half cup (may try a rounded half cup next time cause there looked like there was room for a few more beans in my jars) of beans in your pint jar, (or a cup in quarts) and fill the jar the rest of the way with water.

Let soak overnight, and in the morning dump the water out of the jar, and fill the jar with fresh water, dumping it off and filling it again three times to make sure the beans are rinsed really well.

Once the beans are rinsed, fill the jar with water again (leave a little head space of course), add 1/2 teaspoon salt for pints or 1 teaspoon for quarts. You can add a little onion or spices at this time too if you like. (I've heard adding tomato to beans, before they are cooked will make them not get soft, so I would avoid tomato unless you try it on one jar first...so as not to waste the whole canner full if it does actually stop the beans from getting soft.)

Put the lids on and process the canner at 10 lbs pressure. 75 minute for pints, 90 minutes for quarts.

Enjoy the convenience of having them ready for your recipe's!! :-))

* I hope the printable recipe link worked...if someone would try it and leave a comment to let me know I'd sure appreciate it. Hopefully it prints out ok too. This is my first time trying to give a link to a printable recipe, and I'm not sure I have the site I put the recipe on figured out...so if you have trouble just let me know, and I'll see if I can figure out what I did wrong. LOL