Pressure Canning Homemade Vegetable Broth- Gluten Free Regina

This week I tried my hand at making vegetable broth!

I’m not a big fan of tomato based vegetable broths so when I found a blog about saving your vegetable scraps to make your own broth I thought it was worth a try. Being a vegetarian it didn’t take long for the scraps to add up. I kept them in the freezer and just added to the bag as I was cooking.

In the scraps, there were onion peels, the inside of peppers, the ends and middle of garlic cloves, dill stems, celery, parsley, thyme and rosemary stems, Jalapeno gits, Bok Choy ends. Pretty Much anything I used in the kitchen. I wrapped the frozen lump of vegetable into cheesecloth and boiled them.

I read somewhere for the best flavour to boil for an hour. Which I did and I simmered for a couple hours. I also ended up adding salt…Because I’m a salt junky.

While boiling the stock I also multi-tasked and boiled my jars and lids. Sterilize, Sterilize, Sterilize. As you can see I’m a huge supporter of Classico because you can reuse their jars. However, you have to be sure they seal. I have had lids that the rubber melts off.

Setting everything aside that was sterilized I didn’t realise exactly how much broth I boiled so I ended up having to do a couple rounds of jar sterilization to keep up.

As the broth became ready I also got the lids ready to seal. Remember to stir to let the bubbles out and wipe the top of the jars to make the seal.

With both elements going it got quite warm in the kitchen. It of course only got worse when I added the pressure canner.

The pot I made the broth in after jarring was then washed out and became the pot that I pressure canned in. I filled it with various different sizes of jars. I cooked at 15 pounds (Im sure I could have done 10) for 30 minutes.

I ended up cooking 4 batches. In between, I stored all of the broth in the jars in my kitchen sink in hot water. Sometimes if the liquid gets cold the jars will shatter in the pressure cooker.