# canning beans issues



## Guest (Sep 16, 2011)

We had frost the last two nights so i harvested all the green beans before the frost. I canned 6 quarts using the cold pack method from the Ball Blue book. The beans took on a brownish/redish color and the headspace is about an inch lower than when I put them in the pressure canner. This is the first time I have tried to pressure can anything. Is this normal? Did I do something wrong?


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## Canning Girl (Jan 13, 2010)

I don't know about the color issues, but the loss of water in the jars is called siphoning. It happens for a variety of reasons, but the most common, IME, is not letting the jars sit in the depressurized canner for ten minutes before taking them out. If the pressure on the outside of the jars goes down faster than the pressure inside of the jars, then the liquid will be pushed out. Make sense?


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## marytx (Dec 4, 2002)

I think it happens more, too, when you cold pack, since the product hasn't cooked down first.


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## Guest (Sep 16, 2011)

I turned off the gas after the jars had been in the pressure canner the proper time and went to the dentists. Came back about three hours later and there was no pressure in the canner so I opened it and put the jars on the counter tocool further.


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## McDaid36 (Jul 15, 2011)

I had the same experience with canning the green beans yesterday. It was also my first time pressure canning. I was not quick to take the lid off either. Today I canned baked beans and had the same thing happen, plus one of the jars broke. I'm not so sure I like this pressure canner!!


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## PlicketyCat (Jul 14, 2010)

I had this happen once with my pressure canner and raw pack green beans. I'm not sure why it happened, but the only thing I can think of that I did differently than other times is that the water in my canner was almost boiling when I put the filled jars in. Normally, I just put warm jars in warm water and then seal up the canner before bringing it to a boil and venting. I think maybe the water in canner boiled faster than the water in the jars, so when I vented the canner, it caused a siphon in the jars from the get-go.

As for the discoloration, if you have really hard water the dissolved minerals can sometimes turned your canned stuff funky colors. My first batch of corn here was nearly optic orange because of all the iron in our water, so now I make sure to only use filtered water for my canning liquids.


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## northergardener (Dec 12, 2007)

I believe that if the seed inside the bean is a dark color, that this can darken the beans in the jar.


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## MacaReenie (Mar 1, 2008)

Did you let the jars with the beans in them sit in the pressure canner with the top on and the gauge off for 10 minutes to vent the steam out? If not, that would have helped with the liquid loss. What type of salt did you use? If you used iodized salt, that would turn them a brownish color in spots.


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## chris30523 (Jun 11, 2005)

A green bean with the dark colored seed will make the water and beans a rusty red color. You may have had alot of air bubbles in the beans raw packed and that made the water seem less when you took them out. I used to raw pack thinking that the beans would over cook with the pressure canning and had some of the same issues. I now cook the beans first and put the hot beans and boiling juice into the jars. The beans don't over cook and you end up with more beans per jar .


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