Black Beans!! My First Experience with a Pressure Canner

So I recently had a birthday and imagine my excitement when I opened a pressure canner!!!  I have several bags of dried black beans and I never seem to have 8 hours to cook them so I decided to can some black beans first.

Little did I know one mylar bag of beans is a lot of beans (this isn't all of them)



First I soaked the beans overnight, then I rinsed them and boiled them for 30 minutes





Like I said, a lot of beans.  In the pressure canner is my first batch processing.  The second batch is boiling away.

Long story short, it was a very long process.  Here is what I did.

I took a bunch of black beans and soaked them in water overnight

Second, I rinsed the black beans and brought them to a boil in clean water and boiled the beans for 30 minutes.  Meanwhile, I got another pot of fresh water and brought that to a boil, sanitized my jars, and filled my pressure canner up to the first line (there are marks inside the canner) and heated that water up.

After the beans had boiled in water for 30 minutes, I put a 1/4 tsp of salt (optional) in the bottom of each jar and I filled the jars with drained black beans leaving 1 inch of headspace at the top.  After filling the jars, I pounded them a couple times on the counter to settle the beans and get more beans into each jar.

After filling the jars with black beans, I took my clean boiling water and put that in each jars up until the top of the beans (the 1 inch of headspace is really important).  Then I put my prepared lids on top and screwed on the rings to secure the rings. 

Now for the fun part.  I put the jars into the canner, put the lid on and locked it.  According to manufacturers instructions, I brought the canner up to pressure which for beans at sea level is 11 psi.  This part took quite a while.  I have a pretty big canner.  Then I sat in the kitchen reading and watching the dial on my canner for 75 minutes to make sure it stayed at or above 11 psi because if the pressure lowers below 11 psi, then I would need to start the whole process over again. 

Remember I did this twice because there are a lot of beans in one mylar bag of beans.  After all that work, I did end up with 17 cans of beans (one didn't seal and I needed to throw it out).  I haven't tried them yet, but I plan to use them this summer as they are an easy no cook protein I can use for dinners.