Every year I make about 5 gallons of turkey soup after Thanksgiving. Usually I then dose it out into 1 quart containers and freeze it. That many containers does take up lots of room in the freezer, though I suppose the thermal mass helps keep the freezer efficient. I have a pressure canner that can do 7 quarts at a time, and I have plenty of jars, so equipment expense is limited to a few lids.
Anyway, this year, should I pressure can instead of freezing?
Pros:
Easier to store
Quicker to reheat from room temperature than frozen
Because the soup will cook in the jars, more even distribution of solids and broth between containers
Cons:
Running 3 batches of jars at 70 minutes high pressure each (so 130 minutes or so total time per)
keeping jars waiting to can at hot pack temperature all day, or doing 3 cooks
Modify recipe to remove noodles, add beans?
dying of botulism
That’s more cons than pros, but they’re not all weighted equally.
Also, no thickeners in the pressure canner, but does a roux count? It adds tons of flaver and creaminess to the soup, without thickening the broth.
Just keep in mind that most home-canned food has a shelf-life of 1-2 years, although a low-acid food like soup should keep longer. I would personally not put noodles in it until you are ready to heat and serve. Same with rice. They get soggy and unpleasant sitting in liquid. Even when making it for same-week consumption, I make fresh pasta/rice for each day’s use and ladle the soup over it. Same for fresh herbs.
Yes, roux is a type of thickener, depending on how long you cook it.
That about the right schedule. I think I have one more frozen quart of last year’s soup in the freezer.
That would be ideal, but I usually take them to work for lunch, so I only get what’s in the container. I usually do orzo, because it stands up well enough. Still pretty mushy, but no worse than pasta in commercially canned soup. I add fresh parsley to each container, and then freeze it. The parsley cooks during the reheating process. Canning, I can probably just switch to a tablespoon or so of dried parsley in each jar.
It’s also the least likely. I know doing three batches will be annoying, but as long as I get my time and pressure right, it should be safe. I do have the right equipment, and I’ve done low acid pressure stuff before, but it’s always been just plain broth that becomes a cooking ingredient. (Make broth from the remains of a smoked chicken, and then use that for beans or chili.)
Seconding this. When I make soup I always make the noodles or rice separately and mix them at serving time.
Another possible con to canning soup— the vegetables may get very mushy from the long cooking times. I’m pretty sure I heard somewhere that the companies that make canned soup use special varieties of vegetables that are extremely hard or dense when raw, so they are less mushy after canning.
Now mass produced broth is good for about a year with ranges online from 6 months to 2 years. That’s for professionally produced broth. I found my pressure cooker/canner and I love using homemade broth. So if I can my own broth, can I expect to get a year storage in the pantry? Or are the temperatures and pressures used by the mass-producers so much higher that they get a lot more storage time out of their broth?
Do you have room for a small chest freezer? That seems like a better solution (to me) than canning all that soup. Especially after you described the logistics.
And do you truly find this statement a comfort?
Here’s a diminutive freezer at amazon for $165. Not suggesting you get it from amazon-- just looking at what’s available. It’s 22.2 x 17.5 x 30.3 inches. It’s pictured with a dog next to it, but in fairness, that looks like a puppy to me. My ex-bf kept a small freezer like this in his extra bedroom for homemade ice cream and such.
Yeah, I have the stereotypical suburban garage freezer. I know chest ones are better, but a stand up one fit better in the space. Most years I fill the shelves with a bunch of 32 oz yogurt tubs full of turkey soup. Then maybe 3-8 times per month I’ll pull one out to take to work for lunch. It takes lots of room in the freezer, which does have the side effect of having fewer chicken nuggets and stuff.
I’m not too worried about the safety aspect of canning. Mostly I do high acid water bath stuff, like escabeche, dill green beans, etc. I find the pressure canner to actually be easier and more reliable than the water bath one. For every run in the water bath, usually one or two jars doesn’t seal correctly, but in the pressure canner they always all seal.
The biggest issue is making sure the center of the jar reaches the appropriate temperature for the right amount of time. That should be fine as long as I maintain 13 lbs (altitude) for 75 minutes. That isn’t difficult, it just requires paying attention.
Well, I certainly trust your experience more than I trust a disclaimer by the FDA. They probably wouldn’t even come to my funeral. Or send a card.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant did you have room for an additional freezer, namely, a small chest freezer, that you could reserve just for your soup factory. I assumed you already have a big freezer of some kind that is packed to the walls with other culinary goodies.
Chest freezers are hard to root around in when they’re full. Not terribly efficient design. But if yours was full of nothing but turkey soup there’d be no wondering about what’s down there in the bottom.
That would be great. If only I could convince the family that Memorial Day turkey was a thing, I could keep myself in soup all year.
I could branch out to other varieties of frozen soup, but there’s something about using an otherwise discarded turkey carcass that motivates me more than just buying some leeks and potatoes.
One option is to cook your soup using half (or less) water than usual so that it’s condensed. It’ll take up half the space in the freezer. Just add water at work.
This excerpt from the World Health Organization’s webpage on botulism is relevant:
Though spores of C. botulinum are heat-resistant, the toxin produced by bacteria growing out of the spores under anaerobic conditions is destroyed by boiling (for example, at internal temperature greater than 85 °C for 5 minutes or longer). Therefore, ready-to-eat foods in low oxygen-packaging are more frequently involved in cases of foodborne botulism.
Other sources of information state that when certain strains of the bacteria have spoiled food there’ll be no telltale smell or taste. So, boiling is an indispensable step if you want to be safe.
It’s worth pointing out here that the above refers to boiling the food after the canning process.
My ex-bf kept a small freezer like this in his extra bedroom for homemade ice cream and such.