Starting next week, we’ll be offering a Q&A feature in which we answer (or gamely try to answer) all your DIY home cooking conundrums. Besides your basic kitchen questions, canning, dehydrating, fermenting, freezing, pickling, pressure cooking, and other kinds of food preservation are all fair game. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll try to find someone who does.
Post your questions in the comments below, or drop us a line at dorisandjilly@gmail.com.
What is your advice on canning “gravy” – i.e. tomato sauce with ground meat? Obviously a pressure canner is a must – but is even that safe? Will the fresh herbs can well?
Anne: You can definitely can tomato sauce with meat in the pressure cooker. The challenge, of course, is figuring out how long. The Ball Blue has a somewhat mysterious recipe called “Meat Sauce” (p. 64) that sounds like a tomato sauce with meat: ground beef, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, oregano, etc. They suggest a processing time of 1 hour for pints or 1 hour 15 minutes for quarts at 10 pounds pressure. If that seems like too long for your taste, you could always freeze it.