Canning Ham and Bean Soup

Canning ham and bean soup is such an easy way to fill your shelves with a ready-to-eat homemade dinner that everyone loves!

Ask any Southerner what their favorite comfort meal is, and the odds are good that beans and cornbread are at the top.

But what makes those beans so good? It’s the ham!

Cooking beans in a hammy broth makes all the difference between a “poverty meal”, and a feast.

This canning recipe makes it easy to have this comfort meal on the shelf, ready to heat and serve whenever you want.

Usually, ham and bean soup is made by boiling beans with a ham bone. This is a delicious way to make the recipe, and you can can ham and beans that have been cooked after removing the bone very easily – just put them into hot jars with salt.

However, in this recipe, I’m going to show you how to can ham and bean soup by adding all the ingredients straight into the jars, so that the cooking happens during the canning process. This makes it easier to make a large batch in much less time.

Ingredients for 15 bean ham soup

• Old Navy or Great Northern Beans
• Diced ham
• Chicken broth or water
• Onions
• Garlic
• Carrots
• Celery
• Salt
• Pepper
• Cajun seasoning (a mix of chili powder, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and pepper)
• Thyme or Italian seasoning

You can season this soup to your preference, so feel free to adjust pepper, cajun seasoning, herbs, etc. You can also add or leave out vegetables such as celery (some of my family doesn’t like it, so they would leave it out).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is canning dried beans safe? What makes this an easy canning recipe is layering all the ingredients into jars without cooking them first.

Is this safe? The Ball Blue book recommends partially pre-cooking the beans before canning. This helps them absorb the water and swell to their full size before putting them in jars. Call it a safeguard.

In this recipe, we skip the pre-boil and limit the amount of dried beans in each jar to 2/3 of a cup to leave plenty of room. 

There is some merit to presoaking or precooking the beans. You can boil them with baking soda and bay leaves, which can help de-gas beans (be sure to rinse them well before adding them to your recipe). However, the high heat of pressure canning also destroys compounds that cause… intestinal discomfort. 

Do you have to pressure can the beans?

Low-acid food needs to be pressure-canned. If you’ve read many of my canning recipes, you may be tired of this story, but I can tell you from experience that using a water bath canner for canning things like beans and meat isn’t worth the risk. I come from an Amish community and have known many Amish families who considered pressure canners too modern and water-bathed everything. Not gonna lie; it’s cool how many jars you can fit into a big, custom-made water bath canner, but it’s not worth how many jars go bad over the months. And it’s not worth worrying whether the food you’re about to eat is safe – let alone what happens if it’s not.

Using a pressure canner is easy in comparison.

What kind of jars should I use?

I’m personally not picky about the brand of jar as long as it’s a canning jar. For pressure canner recipes that have the jars under pressure for 90 minutes, you need to use a sturdy jar, so I avoid using old mayonnaise jars, fruit jars, etc., even though a canning lid fits it. So, whatever you have on hand or find the best price on, be it Ball, Golden Harvest, Kerr, or even Walmart’s house brand jar works well.

What about canning lids?

I’m a little more picky about lids than jars. There’s nothing more annoying than when jars don’t seal. So, I don’t use the lids on those Walmart brand jars – they just aren’t dependable.

While I’m happy to use the lids that come with my Ball brand jars, once those have been used, I switch to Denali brand lids, which I buy in bulk.

Canning ham and bean soup

1. Gather ingredients and and prepare canning supplies (sterilizing jars, lids, etc.)
2. Combine carrots, onion, celery, and garlic. This just makes it easier to fill the jars more quickly and get an equal amount in each jar
3. Combine seasonings together (for the same reason)
4. In each quart jar, add 1/2 cup of dry beans. If you choose to use pre-soaked beans, add about 1 cup, or 1 1/4 cup maximum, as the beans will still continue to absorb broth as they go through the canning process, and you need to leave room for the other ingredients.
5. Next, layer in 1/2 cup of cubed ham
6. Divide combined vegetables between the jars
7. And finally, divide the seasonings between the jars
8. Fill jars with ham broth, chicken broth, or water, leaving about an inch of headspace
   
9. Wipe rims clean with a soft, fuzz-free cloth, and screw down lids and rings firmly
10. Prepare pressure canner according to your particular pressure canner’s needs. For a standard 16-quart pressure canner, this usually means adding 2 quarts of water
11. Be sure to add the pressure canner’s inner rack to separate the jars from the bottom of the canner for even heating
12. Arrange jars in the canner so that they do not touch each other or the canner walls. When the canner is full, they may be very close, but the best safeguard against jars breaking is that they don’t touch.
13. Lock the lid onto the canner with the vent open, and heat over medium-high heat until a steady stream of steam begins to escape
14. After ten minutes of steam, close the valve and heat to 10 pounds of pressure (for those under 1,000 above sea level. For those above this, see this USDA-approved pressure conversion chart.)
15. Process quart jars for 90 minutes at pressure
16. When the processing time is complete, remove the canner from heat and let it return to zero pressure naturally (a sudden release of pressure can cause jars to break or even explode)
17. It’s fine to let jars cool completely inside the canner, but if you need to take them out, let them cool as long as you can, and be sure to protect the jar from sudden temperature changes or drafts as you remove it and yourself from the jar as well. I usually will cover the jar with a towel as I remove it and place it on a towel-lined cupboard, covering it with a second towel until it is completely cooled, and I have very rarely had one break, even when the jars are still boiling when I remove them. But remember, it never hurts to exercise more caution than necessary.
18. After the jars have cooled, test for seals
19. After 24 hours, you may wash jars (mine always have hard water residue), remove rings, and store them out of direct light.

To use Canned ham and bean soup

Open the can and pour the contents into a pan. Heat to boiling, and serve as desired.

This is a really good dinner to serve with homemade cornbread or other carbs.

You can see in the photos that my jars have a high broth-to-bean ratio. I really like to add diced potatoes to my bean soup, so I leave room for this – just add them to the pot and cook them right in the bean broth.

It also leaves plenty of broth for everybody who likes to snack their cornbread in it.

Other recipes you may like:

• Home-canned vegetable soup
• Canning chicken soup
• Canned chili
• How to can baked beans
• How to can pinto beans

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