Canning Chicken Soup

If you want to preserve more food and make your own instant meals, canning chicken soup is perfect for you!

One of my favorite things is canning – not just individual foods but ready-to-eat meals.

These jars on my shelves make busy day meals more manageable and more nutritious.

When we can food, we select the ingredients, and cook whole, unprocessed foods for our families to enjoy. There are no preservatives or denaturing of the foods involved in a home kitchen.

And so, we feel good about serving home-canned food to our families and take comfort in knowing that regardless of natural disasters or power outages, our families will be fed.

I love canning soup. Since canning traditionally happens mostly in the summer and is served over the winter when there is less fresh garden produce available, we’re preparing for soup season!

One of my favorites has always been canned vegetable soup, partly because of the memories attached to it, and chicken soup is just another variation.

There are a number of different methods for canning chicken soup, and I think everyone eventually settles on their own combination of methods that works best for them – I’m talking about hot packs vs. cold packs, etc.

For me, I like to cook the chicken first because it’s much easier to debone a cooked chicken than to try to get every scrap of flesh off of a raw chicken, and also because that’s what makes the broth.

But I don’t cook the vegetables before canning. Some folks cook everything first, and some folks cook nothing first. We all have our own best practice.

The recipe in the Ball canning book recommends cooking the soup first. But all of the individual ingredients in this recipe are safe to cold pack (i.e., can from a raw state).

Ingredients for making canned chicken soup

When you think of chicken soup, you probably have your ideal chicken soup recipe already in mind. Not every chicken soup is safe to can, however, so it’s important to be aware that you may have to adapt your family recipe. We’ll cover some adaptations in the next section.

For now, let’s go over the ingredients in this recipe.

• Chicken
• Water
• Onions
• Celery
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Peas
• Garlic
• Rosemary
• Italian seasoning
• Salt
• Pepper
• Optional: chicken bouillon cubes or powder

All of these ingredients are very simple but combine to pack a lot of chicken soup flavor!

Ingredient changes and substitutions.

This is an interesting topic, and changing recipes can become a heated topic when it comes to canning because there are safety issues.

Here are some changes you can make without worrying about safety:

• Leave the potatoes out. If you want to make a lower-carb soup, you can easily omit the potatoes. Adjust your broth or the amount of other vegetables to make the soup more, or less brothy as you desire.
• Omit/replace/adjust quantities of other vegetables. I think onions, celery, and carrots are important components of a good chicken soup base. They add a lot of flavor to the broth and are pretty essential. However, when it comes to quantities, maybe your kids aren’t such fans of celery, so you could cut the quantity in half. With other vegetables, you can easily make swaps or additions. Omit peas, or add corn or green beans, etc.
• Chang the herbs. I use rosemary and Italian seasoning in my soup, but you can also use a combination of basil, oregano, parsley, and thyme (which are all in Italian seasoning).

All of these changes will not impact your canning time.

One of the most common types of chicken soup is chicken noodle soup, however, and we need to talk about it.

You should not can noodles. Again, we are canning at home. We’re not using preservatives or high-pressure equipment. The starch in flour is difficult to can safely, and it is not recommended for home canning. The same applies to rice.

Besides this, by the end of the caning process, the pasta will most likely lose all its texture, and you’ll be left with overcooked noodles at best.

Instead, if you want to make chicken noodle soup, I suggest you omit the potatoes and/or add more broth to give your canned soup a higher broth-to-vegetable ratio, then add the noodles when you’re ready to serve.

You can do this by cooking the noodles separately and adding the drained noodles or dropping uncooked noodles into the pot as you heat the soup and simmer until tender. This works especially well with homemade egg noodles.

Any starch or dairy products should be saved until you are ready to heat and serve your soup. So, no thickeners, cream, etc., in the canning recipe.

See the National Center for Home Food Preservation for more on this.

How to can chicken soup

1. Step one is cooking your chicken and making the chicken broth.
2. Select a roughly 5-pound chicken and cover it with 4 quarts of water. (note: if your pot is not large enough to hold the chicken and all the water, you can add the remainder of the water later)
   
3. We’re not going to season the chicken just yet, which sounds wrong, but it helps avoid having to strain out herbs and pepper, which will build up with foam around the sides of your pot as it cooks. Don’t worry! You’ll be adding seasonings later. This will also allow us to get the correct amount of salt in each jar for preservation.
4. Bring your chicken and water to a simmer, and simmer until fully cooked through – about an hour.
   
5. Remove chicken from broth and set aside until it’s cool enough to debone.
6. Strain broth if needed to remove debris.
7. While the chicken is cooking, chop/peel and dice your vegetables.
   
8. Combine all vegetables and seasoning except salt in a large kettle. I use my water bath canning kettle since it’s the largest pot I own.
9. Pour broth into kettle with vegetables.
   
10. Debone chicken, chop if desired, and add to pot. Reserve bones to make bone broth later (see how to can chicken broth). Add chicken bouillon if used to intensify the chicken flavor.
    
11. Stir everything well.
12. Prepare 8-quart jars or 16-pint jars with lids and rings. It’s important for your canning jars to be clean and sterile. If reusing previously used jars, you will also need replacement lids. I usually bulk order mine from Denali Canning since they’re guaranteed to seal (and I’ve had a near 100% seal rate!).
13. Fill jars with soup leaving about 1-inch headspace. Use a butterknife or wand if needed to stir the soup in the jar to remove air bubbles.
    
14. Add one teaspoon of salt to each quart jar or 1/2 teaspoon to each pint jar.
15. Wipe the rim of each jar clean, and screw the lids and bands down firmly.
16. Place jars in a pressure canner prepared according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
17. Lock the lid onto the canner with the steam valve open.
18. Heat canner over medium-high heat until a steady stream of steam escapes.
19. Time for ten minutes, then close the valve and bring to ten pounds of pressure at seal level, or your equivalent (Use this altitude conversion chart for reference).
20. Process pints for 65 minutes or quarts for 90 minutes.
21. Remove from heat when processing time is complete, and let the canner return to zero pressure naturally.

At this point, you may let jars continue cooling inside the canner. If needed, you can open the canner and carefully move jars onto a towel, covering them with a second towel to protect them from drafts that could cause the extremely hot jars to break or even explode. BE SURE TO PROTECT YOURSELF during this process, as hot jars and/or food can cause severe burns.

When the jars are completely cool, check the seals.I recommend giving them 24 hours or so before removing the rings and washing and storing jars in a cool place out of direct light.

To use: Open a jar and heat in a saucepan. Serve with cornbread or sourdough biscuits.

Other canning recipes you will love:

• Canning baked beans
• How to can deer meat
• How to can vegetable soup
• Canning pinto beans
• Canning beef stew

 

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