# canning leftovers question



## arwenmark (Mar 23, 2014)

To those of you that can leftovers, do you heat them and the jars and water in canner? of do you basically pack them like raw pack with cold food and jars and water in canner? also depending on what it is do you add water to your jars? How do you figure processing times?


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## LincTex (Apr 1, 2011)

arwenmark said:


> How do you figure processing times?


Since leftovers are cooked and not raw meat, I would say you probably don't need the full time as if you were processing raw meat. It's up to you.


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## Caribou (Aug 18, 2012)

Most of my leftovers go into the fridge, most of the rest go into the freezer. If I am firing up the canner it is because I have enough to make it worthwhile. This usually means that I intended to can so I made up a big batch. It is not so much that I am canning leftovers as that I am eating part of my canning project.


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## siletz (Aug 23, 2011)

If it's something from the fridge, I warm it back up on the stove before packing it into my hot jars and processing. You need to process for the length of time of the ingredient that needs the longest processing. So, say you have beef stew with carrots, potatoes, and beef. In a pressure canner a quart of carrots alone would be processed for 30 mins, potatoes alone would be processed 40 mins, and beef alone would be processed 90 mins. So, you need to process the beef stew for 90 mins. I would highly suggest getting Jackie Clay's canning book. It has all kinds of great info about canning and has become my primary canning resource.

http://www.backwoodshome.com/store/files/jc01.html


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## UncleJoe (Jan 11, 2009)

Yep. What siletz said. ^^^


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## arwenmark (Mar 23, 2014)

LincTex said:


> Since leftovers are cooked and not raw meat, I would say you probably don't need the full time as if you were processing raw meat. It's up to you.


No that is not correct, I know that you would process for the time of the longest item and if there is meat in there it would be 75min pints and 90min quarts at whatever pressure is right for where you are, I was more interested in the temperature and jar filling, Hot into hot or cold into cold and whether it would matter.


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## UniqueOldGal (Mar 7, 2012)

LincTex said:


> Since leftovers are cooked and not raw meat, I would say you probably don't need the full time as if you were processing raw meat. It's up to you.


Like others said it has to be full time. Cooking is not the point;the point is to kill botulism bacteria.


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## Dakine (Sep 4, 2012)

Caribou said:


> Most of my leftovers go into the fridge, most of the rest go into the freezer. If I am firing up the canner it is because I have enough to make it worthwhile. This usually means that I intended to can so I made up a big batch. It is not so much that I am canning leftovers as that I am eating part of my canning project.


Same here, I will have chili because it didn't all fit in the canner, so be it, and especially with the ground beef I've been doing lately, I'll have something with ground beef because I dont pack the jars as tight as possible so that it stays crumbles... leaves a lot of leftovers that I eat as a meal instead of the other way around.


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## goshengirl (Dec 18, 2010)

It can be done either way. 

I usually go ahead and put leftovers into canning jars after a meal (if I know that I'm planning to can them) and then put them in the fridge. Let's say I end up with a few pints of beef stew one night, a few pints of spaghetti sauce (w/meat) the next night, and I know I'm going to end up with a few pints of chicken on the third night. That makes a full canner load, and all three items require the same time to can since they're all meat based. In this scenario, what I'll do is go ahead and pull the refrigerated items (beef stew and spaghetti sauce) out of the fridge and put them in the canner on really, really low so as to slowly warm them up and not stress the glass. Then prepare the chicken, eat dinner, and by the time that's all done the jars in the canner have warmed up nice and slow. At that point I just put the chicken leftovers in their jars and put them in the canner and start canning. So that's kind of like having both cold pack and hot pack in the same canner. But it works for me.

Hope that helps.


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