How to Pressure Can Beef Stew in Canada (Bernardin Method)

Pressure-canned beef stew is the king of Canadian shelf-stable meals. You open a jar, warm it for 10 minutes, and serve dinner. No prep, no thawing, no equipment beyond a pot — a complete meal already cooked.

Corrected 21 September 2026. This page used to hand Bernardin’s beef-stew times to venison and moose, in a FAQ answer and in two variation sections, and justified the moose one with a density difference we had invented. Two things have changed and they point in opposite directions. Venison: Bernardin does name it, but in a different recipe — Roast Beef, Lamb, Mutton, Pork, Veal or Venison, page 398 of the Complete Book of Home Preserving (ISBN 978-0-7788-0137-5), a boneless-meat recipe with its own method and its own times. If you were canning venison as a stew on this page’s times, the recipe you want is that one, not this one. Moose: it is named on neither page 398 nor page 399, so we hold no tested time for it and this page no longer offers one. If you pressure-canned moose stew on the times from this page, we cannot tell you whether the process was enough, because nobody has tested it. Québec’s rule for a jar you doubt is “When in doubt, throw it out!”, and that is the honest answer we can give.

Corrected 21 September 2026: a beef-bourguignon variation has been removed, along with the red wine it told you to cook into the broth. The variation carried a safety clearance of ours — that alcohol cooked into the broth reduces to a safe level. Nobody publishes that, and step 1 of this same page tells you not to deglaze the skillet with wine because alcohol is untested at pressure, so the page was arguing with itself ninety lines apart. Adding wine to Bernardin’s Beef Stew with Vegetables also makes it a recipe nobody has tested, which is what this page says about adding meat to a soup. No wine quantity is offered in its place, and the mushrooms went with it because the wine was what made the variation bourguignon.

Pressure canning is the only safe home method for beef stew. Beef, vegetables, and broth are all low-acid; water-bath canning will not destroy botulism spores. There is no exception.

This guide covers the Bernardin method. The processing times and PSI are standard Bernardin numbers; verify against your edition before starting.

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The no-thickener rule

The single most-important rule for pressure-canned stew:

No flour. No cornstarch. No arrowroot. No instant ClearJel. No starchy thickener of any kind.

Thickeners create a dense barrier that prevents heat from reaching the centre of the jar. Centre doesn’t reach kill temperature. Botulism risk results.

The fix: thicken when you reheat to serve. Open the jar, warm the stew in a pot, stir in 1-2 tbsp of cornstarch slurry (cornstarch + cold water) in the last 5 minutes. You get the thick stew texture without the safety risk.

Same rule applies to rice, barley, pasta, beans, and any other starchy addition that would thicken or densify the stew.

What you need

For 6 × 1 L jars:

• 1.5 kg stew beef (chuck, brisket, or pre-cut stew meat) — cubed to 2-3 cm pieces
• 4 medium carrots — peeled and cut into 2 cm rounds
• 4 medium potatoes (Yukon Gold or red) — peeled and cubed to 2 cm pieces
• 2 medium onions — diced
• 3 celery stalks — sliced to 1 cm
• 4 cloves garlic — minced
• 1.5 L beef broth — hot
• 2 tsp pickling salt (non-iodized)
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 2 bay leaves (split between jars)
• ¼ tsp black pepper
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce (optional)
• 2 tbsp tomato paste — yes to a small amount; it adds flavour without thickening significantly
• Bernardin 1 L wide-mouth jars — yields 6 jars
• Fresh SNAP lids and bands
• Pressure canner (see the pressure canner buying guide)
• Standard canning kit plus large skillet for browning meat

Method

Step 1: Brown the meat

1. Trim beef of excess fat and gristle. Fat can turn rancid during long storage.
2. Cut into 2-3 cm cubes. Uniform size matters for even cooking.
3. Brown in batches in a hot skillet with 1 tbsp neutral oil. About 2-3 minutes per side, until well-browned (not fully cooked through). Browning is for flavour; the long pressure cycle does the actual cooking.
4. Transfer browned beef to a large bowl.

Don’t deglaze the skillet with wine or flour — wine introduces alcohol that’s untested at pressure, and flour we already discussed.

Step 2: Prep the vegetables

1. Carrots: peel, slice 2 cm thick
2. Potatoes: peel (or scrub well if leaving skin), cube 2 cm pieces. Hold in cold water to prevent browning.
3. Onions: dice
4. Celery: slice 1 cm
5. Garlic: mince

Keep vegetables as uniform-sized chunks. Tiny diced vegetables turn to mush; large 5 cm chunks may not cook through.

Step 3: Make the broth

1. In a large pot, bring 1.5 L beef broth to a rolling boil.
2. Stir in tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, salt, thyme, oregano, black pepper. Don’t add bay leaves to the broth — add them to individual jars.
3. Keep at a low simmer until packing.

Step 4: Pack the jars

1. Have the pressure canner with 7-8 cm of hot water and the rack inside, lid off, gently simmering.
2. Have hot 1 L jars on the counter.
3. Fill each hot jar with the following layered approach:
   • 1 small piece of bay leaf
   • About 1 cup browned beef cubes
   • About 1 cup mixed vegetables (carrots, potato, onion, celery, garlic)
   • Tap jar gently on counter to settle contents
4. Pour hot broth over to cover the contents, leaving 2.5 cm (1 inch) headspace — Bernardin’s figure for this recipe. This is more headspace than water-bath canning; don’t reduce it.
5. Run the headspace tool down the side of each jar to release air bubbles. Top up broth if needed.
6. Wipe rims with a clean damp cloth.
7. Apply fresh SNAP lids fingertip-tight.

Step 5: Process

1. Lower jars into the canner. Water level should be 7-8 cm — not covering jars.
2. Lock the lid. Heat on high.
3. Vent for 10 full minutes. Continuous steam through the open vent. Critical safety step.
4. Apply the regulator. Bring to 10 PSI (or higher per your altitude — see below).
5. Start the timer when pressure is reached:
   • 1 L jars: 90 minutes at 10 PSI
   • 500 mL jars: 75 minutes at 10 PSI
6. Maintain pressure by adjusting heat. If pressure drops below 10 PSI, you must restart the timer when it returns. Don’t walk away.

Step 6: Cool and check

1. Turn off heat at the end of the timer. Don’t move the canner. Don’t open it.
2. Let depressurize naturally — 45-60 minutes. Never force-cool.
3. Once at zero, remove the weight, wait 2 minutes, then remove the cover — tilting it away from your face. Two minutes is Bernardin’s figure.
4. Lift jars with the jar lifter. Cool 24 hours undisturbed on a towel.
5. Check seals. Lid concave and immovable.
6. Wipe jars with a clean damp cloth (broth often siphons during cooling).
7. Label with date. Store.

If a jar doesn’t seal: the 24-hour rule applies. Bernardin publishes three endings for an unsealed jar of any product: reprocess it immediately, refrigerate it and use within a few days, or freeze it. No authority publishes a separate, shorter window for low-acid food, so take the short end of those few days rather than the long end.

Altitude adjustments

Altitude	Weighted gauge	Dial gauge
0 – 305 m	10 PSI	11 PSI
306 – 609 m	15 PSI	11 PSI
610 – 1,219 m	15 PSI	12 PSI
1,220 – 1,828 m	15 PSI	13 PSI
1,829 – 2,438 m	15 PSI	14 PSI
2,439 – 3,048 m	15 PSI	15 PSI

Times stay 90/75 minutes; PSI changes. See the full Canadian-city altitude table.

Storage and serving

• Cool, dark, dry place at room temperature
• Best quality 12 months — Bernardin’s guidance is to use home-canned food within one year. That is a quality window, not an expiry: the jar is as safe as the process made it. Colour, flavour and texture fade.
• After opening: refrigerate, use within one week (HealthLink BC)
• Inspect every jar before opening — bulging lid means discard immediately, no exceptions

Corrected 20 September 2026: this page previously gave an after-opening window of 3-4 days, a shorter figure specific to this food that no authority we could find publishes. HealthLink BC File #22 publishes one week for any opened home-canned container — “Once the container has been opened, refrigerate leftovers, and use within one week.” This correction makes the window longer rather than shorter: anyone who discarded a jar at 3-4 days was going by a number we had no source for. The shelf life of the sealed jar is unchanged.

To serve

1. Open a jar.
2. Pour contents into a saucepan.
3. Optional thickener (now, not before): mix 1 tbsp cornstarch with 2 tbsp cold water; stir into stew.
4. Warm to a simmer for 5-10 minutes.
5. Taste, adjust salt and pepper, optionally add fresh herbs (parsley, chives) for brightness.
6. Serve with bread, dumplings, or over noodles.

A 1 L jar serves 2-3 hungry people as a main dish, or 4 as a side with bread.

Variations

Hungarian goulash style

Add 1 tbsp Hungarian paprika to the broth. Use beef chuck (traditional).

Hearty winter beef and root vegetables

Add cubed turnip, parsnip, rutabaga in addition to (or instead of) carrots. Cubed sweet potato also works.

Beef and barley soup (broth-style, not stew)

Reduce vegetables to about half the volume; increase broth proportionally; DO NOT add barley before canning. Add cooked barley when you reheat to serve. The canned version is essentially “beef and vegetable broth”; you barley it up during serving.

Venison — a Bernardin recipe of its own, not this one

This page used to hand venison the beef-stew time. Bernardin publishes a recipe that names venison, and it is not this one.

The Complete Book of Home Preserving (ISBN 978-0-7788-0137-5) carries Roast Beef, Lamb, Mutton, Pork, Veal or Venison on page 398 — a boneless-meat recipe with its own method, at 10 lb (69 kPa), 75 minutes for a 500 mL jar and 90 for a 1 L. Venison is in the title, so it sits inside a tested recipe rather than being an extension of one.

It is not a stew. There are no vegetables in the jar and the pack is different, so it is a different thing to cook, not this recipe with the beef swapped out. Follow page 398 as written in your own edition. One caution on the printed page rather than on the figures: step 4 brackets those jar sizes as “pint (250 mL)” and “quart (500 mL)”, which is a misprint — a pint jar is 500 mL and a quart is 1 L, as the book’s own page 10 shows. The times are right; go by the jar in your hand. We have not read that page’s headspace or pack, so take those from the recipe.

Moose — no Bernardin recipe we hold names it

Page 398 names beef, lamb, mutton, pork, veal and venison. The ground-meat variation on page 399 names the same six. Moose is on neither list, and a recipe that names six meats has not tested a seventh — absence from a list the source itself wrote is evidence, not a gap to fill by resemblance.

So there is no tested time for moose here or anywhere else we hold, and we will not put Bernardin’s name on one. Freeze it, or follow a tested recipe written for the meat you actually have. The same goes for elk, caribou and bison, which are named on neither page.

Common problems

• Vegetables turned mushy. Some softening is expected after 90 minutes at pressure. Cubes too small or vegetables too ripe will be worse. Use slightly under-ripe firm vegetables next batch.
• Beef is tough. Either too-lean cut, or pressure dropped during processing (broke the cycle). Use chuck or brisket; maintain pressure steady.
• Broth separated / fat layer on top. Normal. Skim if desired when serving.
• Liquid siphoned during processing (jar partially empty). Common with stews. Siphoning does not change whether the jar was processed according to current home canning recommendations, and that is the condition Bernardin’s clearance rests on — not the liquid level. See why jars lose liquid.
• Cloudy broth. Hard water in canner or naturally cloudy from beef collagen. Safe.
• Jar didn’t seal. The 24-hour rule. Bernardin says reprocess immediately, refrigerate and use within a few days, or freeze — take the short end of those few days for a low-acid food.
• Bulging lid weeks/months later. Discard immediately without opening or tasting. Bulging in pressure-canned meat is a clear botulism warning sign. See our discard protocol.

Why home-canned beef stew is worth it

• Best convenience meal you can make — a real, hot, homemade dinner in 10 minutes
• Costs less than equivalent commercial products — Dinty Moore beef stew is $4-5 per can in Canada; home-canned with quality beef and fresh vegetables is ~$3-4 per 1 L jar
• Quality control — you know exactly what’s in your jar
• Use sale beef — when chuck is marked down at the grocery, can a batch before it expires
• A winter of dinners on the shelf — a stew you cooked in September is a hot meal in February

Yield expectations

• 1.5 kg beef + vegetables → 6 × 1 L jars (one full Presto-23 batch with 1 empty rack slot, or 7 jars filled)
• Each 1 L jar yields 2-3 hungry-person dinner portions
• 6 jars = 12-18 meal portions = roughly 2-3 weeks of dinners

A typical Canadian household does 1-2 stew-canning sessions per fall and pulls jars through the winter.

Next steps

• Best pressure canner in Canada — Presto vs All American — equipment guide
• How to pressure can chicken — companion protein recipe
• Pressure canning pillar — broader method
• Canning altitude adjustments — required reading
• How to tell if canned food has gone bad — botulism awareness
• SNAP lid reuse rules — fresh lids every batch
• Pressure-canned dried beans — the cheap protein staple.