ahh good idea, thank you!Farmfresh said:Also the noodles in the soup will not turn out very well after canning. I would just freeze that. When I can soups I always make everything like normal, but no noodles or rice. I just add them and some extra water when I am ready to heat the soup.
learning...
This way, they get the boiling and they get the boiling 
It looks like 2 of my 3 soup jars have sealed (boo on the last one) but I might just end up giving them to the chickens if the noodles turned as bad as you make me fear. I tend not to be a foodie anyway though, so maybe the taste won't bother me too much, hah.
You don't need to sterilize the jars before pressure canning. But you don't want to put hot food into cold jars because the jars are expensive and might crack. I've heard that you shouldn't jeat the jars in the oven, but there was no reasoning given. It makes sense to me, but I am usually in the backyard, slaving over a huge propane burner, so the oven would be of no use to me.MetalSmitten said:
Noodles are not just a matter of taste. They break down and have the same effect as adding so much flour and thereby thicken the soup. If the liquid is thick, the heat transfers more slowly from the edges of the jar into the center. Heat transfer by conduction alone (like if you have a jar packed solid with meat or something) is really slow, so most canning recipes call for a thin liquid to boil through the food. That's the reason they don't recommend thick soups or packing food into jars. So take it easy on the noodles. Obviously, a few noodles aren't going to kill you. Just don't plan on canning spaghetti.MetalSmitten said:Thank you everyone, you guys are so amazingly helpful
Now to scrounge up more things to can!
Not a stupid question. When pressure canning, you don't need to sterilize first, just have it clean (you don't want leftover stuff on your food, right?). I believe, according to my canning group, you really don't need to sterilize if you're pressure canning or if you're boiling water bath canning for at least 10 minutes.MetalSmitten said:I'm canning for the very first time!
(I'm eyeing our little potato harvest too, we'll see what happens after this first attempt is done.)
Can I ask a dumb question real quick? Why do you need to boil the jars and simmer the lids before you pressure can things? I keep reading how important it is for sterilization purposes, but I wonder why you need to bother when the whole point of canning is to basically sterilize the food... you'd think the jar/lid would be sterilized at the same time. Does anybody skip that step, or am I just trying to be lazy?
