Tomorrow is the first day of September, and with it comes all those traditional end-of-summer events, including tomato canning season (at least here in the mid-Atlantic where I live). Because the yearly tomato glut is finally beginning to arrive, I’ve been getting a number of questions about how to safely can tomatoes.
The most frequent question I get is from people wondering if they can boiling water bath process their favorite spaghetti sauce recipe. You know, the kind that has plenty of garlic, onions, basil, olive oil and sometimes even a few peppers.
Sadly, I always end up delivering disappointing news. You really can’t just can your family recipe. Anything canned in a boiling water bath needs to be high acid (for the science minded types, this means that it has to have a pH of 4.5 or below). This is because botulism cannot grow in high acid environments. However, tomatoes are in the grey zone, typically having a pH right around 4.5. Because of this, tomatoes need to be acidified when canned, so that the acid levels are pushed into the safe zone and the pH becomes something lower than 4.5. That’s why my instructions (and all other good ones you’ll find) for canning whole tomatoes includes two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice per jar (you can also use citric acid if you prefer).
When you make spaghetti sauce, one typically adds a slew of ingredients that, while delicious, lower the acid to seriously unsafe levels. Unless your family spaghetti sauce recipe contains several cups of red wine vinegar, it will be too low in acid to be canned in a boiling water bath.
Most canning information will repeatedly remind you that it’s incredibly important to follow tested recipes. While I will occasionally play around a bit with jams and pickles (and I only do this because I know which aspects can’t be monkeyed with), even I never deviate when it comes to acidifying my tomatoes. I always follow the instructions in either the Ball Blue Book or So Easy to Preserve when I want to preserve tomato sauce, soup and salsas.
The one caveat I have to offer is that if you have a pressure canner, you may be able to preserve your beloved sauce recipe (just so you know, any recipe that includes meat MUST be pressure canned). Pressure canners raise the internal temperature of your jars to temperatures in the neighborhood of 240 degrees, which is high enough to kill off any botulism spores that may exist in your food. However, you should still consult recipes that have been tested using a pressure canner to determine processing time and pressure.
The good news here is that there are plenty of safe, tested tomato recipes that are designed for canning. Let’s hear about your favorites!
Scott, I’m not an expert at high elevation canning, but I do know that processing times do get much longer the higher you are. Here’s a guide to high altitude canning: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/foodnut/p41.html
Heather, this post was only about processing things in a boiling water canner. The rules change when you’re using a pressure canner.
Katie, you’re right, freezing is another option.
The other option for storing homemade spaghetti sauce is freezing. Use a thick, high quality freezer bag and store in 2-3 cup increments. If you freeze them flat, they take up remarkable little space in the freezer.
I have been canning for 20 years. My mother taught me everything she knows. I have always canned my homemade marinara sauce as is without adding lemon juice or vinegar. I process quarts 1 hour and 15 minutes at 10 lbs pressure in the pressure cooker. This is an alternative to hot water bath canning that allows safe canning of low acid foods. My mother canned leftover meats, soups, seafood, and even homemade peanut butter using the pressure cooker. With the pressure cooker I can 500 jars a year and save huge on groceries.
i live at 6200 feet elevation at Lake Tahoe. i have heard to can successfully i will need a pressure canner due to the altitude and boiling temp at high altitude. i have a pressure cooker is that the same as a pressure canner?
Lemon juice and vinegar are NOT equivalent! Lemon juice is twice as acidic as vinegar. http://www.chile-pepper-sauces.com/canning-salsa.html
Hey – I’m a beginner canner and my girlfriend and I canned about 6 jars of tomato sauce a few days ago. We used the boiling water seal method, and it wasn’t until after we got them all done that we read more about tomato canning and botulism spores. We put some wine in our sauce but no lemon juice or vinegar. This page was really helpful, so first and foremost, thanks.. That said, I guess my main question is: After just a few days of being jarred can we open it all back up, cook it and redo the canning but adding the lemon juice the second time around, or is this batch just doomed? – Dave in Philly.
Dave, you probably should uncan that batch, boil it for a while, add some acid (consult Ball instructions on how much) and recan it. If you don’t, you could end up too nervous to eat it later on down the line.
Some additional input on Lu’s oil question…
I’ve had my pressure canner for close to two years now and, as I mentioned, I can my own soup recipes (following the times for veggie or chicken soup depending on whether I used any meat or meat broth). I’m fairly heavy-handed with the oil during the saute phase and I’ve never had a jar not seal as long as you leave the right headspace. I also can my own chicken stock and occasionally, a little chicken fat will make it into the jar. It always seals fine and, as it cools, the fat rises to the top.
I too hunted for answers about why you can’t use oil and starches in canned goods–even pressure canning. I was further frustrated when some Ball and other “tested recipes” call for oil after giving you a mini-lecture on not using it. After doing some research, here’s what I think (and mind you, this is an educated guess)…
1) If the food siphons (leaks out during processing) and there’s a lot of oil, I suppose it could keep it from sealing. If you leave proper head space and clean the jar rim prior to closing, this should happen very rarely.
2) Oil is very heat-sensitive. It goes rancid easily when exposed to heat and light. Since pressure caning reaches 240 degrees or higher, you could be accelerating the break-down of the oil. Furthermore, it could probably go rancid sitting on the shelf later–even if unopened. (I’m not positive about this). Rancidity won’t kill you but it tastes pretty awful.
3) Pressure canning is about time, temperature, AND DENSITY of the food, which affects heat absorption. Adding lots of oil to a recipe will make the food absorb heat at a different rate (faster, I suspect…think about deep fat frying). Not only will this change canning times, but it may cook your food faster than water and you’ll have a mushy product.
4) Expansion – If you’ve ever used a deep fat fryer, you know that you can only fill the pot 2/3 full because the hot oil expands when water-logged items are dropped into it. I actually spotted a canning recipe the other day for vinaigrette-based canned red peppers. The instructions specifically say not to fill the jars more than 3/4 full because of expansion.
Bottom line is that I don’t think the oil is so much of a safety issue as it is a hassle and quality issue. The people who write books of tested canning recipes want to guarantee that they’ll work, look good, and taste good 100% of the time–and be safe. The only way they can do that is to instruct you to avoid ingredients that are temperamental.
Thanks, Marisa for opening up this great discussion! A lot of us more seasoned canners really want to learn how to work on our own recipes and it’s nice to have a form where people can share their personal successes and failures.
what do you say when people ask if they can reduce the salt in pickles? i have only found a recipe for low-sodium pickles, but someone was asking me if they can reduce the salt in dilly beans. I know salt acts as a preservative in fermenting, and preserves color, flavor, and texture in quick packs, but what about safety and low-sodium pickled products? Is that something they can reduce safely? Ball and Nat’l Center for Home Food Preservation don’t address this questions. Thanks!
Hah! My large farm family always canned quarts and quarts of stewed tomatoes (among other things)…always plain…and doctored them up as we used them in recipes. The funny thing is now all the recipes I have from my Mom (now deceased) give ingredients in terms of quarts of stewed tomatoes…which makes it not impossible, but sometimes a little difficult to “translate” into today’s store canned items…
Does it really need to be bottled lemon juice? Can it be replaced by fresh lemon juice? Is bottled lemon juice concentrated or ready to drink? Sorry about the confusion, but I’m in Portugal and I’m trying to figure out how to replace this in an accurate way. Thanks!
I have a love affair going on with my 23-quart pressure canner… oh the wonderful things we make together. 🙂 High, high, high on the list of favorites – a sublime pomodoro that my friend who lives in Tuscany gave me the general guidelines for. I use my juicer/steamer to separate and reduce – pressure canning the resulting vegetable stock, as well as the incredible sauce that morphs therefrom. Sigh… if we ever get tomatoes from our very sad garden this year I will break out in the hallelujah chorus!
I’m with the commenter above! A few years ago I canned a ton of tomato sauce and then not as many whole tomatoes. I ended up reaching for the whole tomatoes much more often, and realized that I could always have made tomato sauce out of the canned ones. So now I basically only can whole tomatoes.
I’m wondering your thoughts on heirloom tomatoes, which can often be lower in acid (particularly if you are throwing a few yellow tomatoes in too). I pressure can, so I’m less worried, but I’m wondering if you think about this.
I find this discussion very interesting. For years my mother made tomato, celery and onion soup in jars. She boiled and overflowed then sealed the jars. She didn’t put the jars in a water bath. I don’t remember any going bad when I was a child.
I have been using her recipe successfully for years and haven’t had any problems.
I am wondering if we have just been very lucky all these years!!
Cheers Loretta
I always tell those people to just get the tomatoes canned and then make the sauce later and it will be just as good!
Alternately, you can make up a batch of the family recipe if you’re going to freeze it. I use my FoodSaver for mine and it works out wonderfully.
that’s why I freeze my pizza sauce. I have successfully canned salsa from the Simply in Season cookbook for several years now – I wonder what the acid is there.
My friend who cans green beans in her pressure canner says botulism can be killed by boiling food for 5 minutes before serving. Is this true?
Marisa, we use pHmeter all the time in laboratory (this is my work), this is the instrument to mesure the pH, but we need to calibrate with standard solutions before use and need a sensor for the temperature of the sauce when we take the lecture.
And for strip-test, I agree with punkin3,14, the pigment of sauce could do interference when this is time to mesure pH… That kind of test are qualitative instead of quantitative… but useful in lot of case.
Also, having a pH at least then 4.5 when you have pasta sauce is not enought, you need to increase time of boiling to be sure the middle of your jar will reach 212F (you have more thermoresistance with lot of solid, case of tomato pasta) and killed all the bacteria (but spore of botulisme will not growth because of the acidity, same as with other acid recipes).
Other thing, the toxin of botulism is not thermoresistant… That mean, if you have the toxine in your jar of sauce (after long time storage) then you boil your sauce for at least 10 minutes before consum it, you destroy the toxin 🙂 I didn’t said to do that, I just said reboiling your sauce before eating is an other safety!
I love your post, this is a very important point to know when we can 🙂
Ok thanks – it tastes good but better eat it up now and try to find a fruit salsa recipe that I like as is.
Lu, when you’re pressure canning, the pH of your food isn’t an issue anymore, so I imagine that you’re right and the lower amounts of oil are due to the fact that they want to ensure a seal. As far as the herbs go, I don’t have enough experience to speak from.
Kristen, peppers are low acid, so if you increase their amounts, you will lower the acid of the finished product. I gotta say, your salsa makes me nervous.
p.s. thanks for the help
Marisa,
Yes I did increase onion a bit. In the future could I make these substitutions by adding some more acid, like more lemon/lime juice or vinegar? Maybe I need to eat this batch soon.
I have read some recipes on Ninja Poodles that say add more peppers if you want more heat but with no change in lemon juice or vinegar – is that bad idea though?
I was wondering if you had any idea of what effect (if any) olive oil might have on pressure canning a tomato sauce (which includes meat).
I’ve been reluctant so far to try canning my mother’s tomato sauce because of the olive oil. I’ve found recipes (in approved books) similar enough to my mothers that I know what time + pressure would be good, but the all use less olive oil than I feel is necessary in order to sautee the onions (I was already counting on leaving out the garlic because garlic + oil + room temperature is too botulism friendly) before adding the tomatoes and the rest of the stuff. Though not that much oil that you can even tell it’s there in the sauce.
From what I’ve been reading, it looks like the worst the oil could do is make the jars not seal – kind of what happens when canning a meat based stock if you didn’t skim most of the fat off. Which is easy enough to know when I test the seals before storing the jars. So I was just wondering if you knew anything else about this subject.
Also, related to tomato sauces – what’s your experience as far as flavor is concerned with adding herbs (fresh or dried) to the sauce? Is the flavor of the herbs totally lost when you open the jars month later? I’m just wondering if it might be a better idea to leave them out altogether and add herbs once I open the jars and reheat the sauce…
Last year my hubby and I made the Seasoned Tomato Sauce recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving… sadly, not with tomatoes from our garden. We call it tomato GRAVY because its really light and perfect for all year round. It calls for 1 Tbsp of bottled lemon juice per pint jar. Everybody loved it and nobody got paralyzed, so we’re making it again this year… FROM our garden! 🙂
oops – I also added a few cloves of garlic to the Pineapple Chili Salsa recipe.
Marisa,
I am a canning newby and have really enjoyed your site, the ball canning book I have just didn’t give me enough info or variety on the subject. However this recent post has me concerned about a batch of salsa I just made and canned. It is the Pineapple Chili Salsa in the Ball book but I tweaked it a bit to my tastes. I changed the papaya to mango, added some jalepeno’s for more heat, used yellow instead of green onions and upped the brown sugar by 4 TBS, oh and I also added a few shakes of chipotle Tabasco sauce for a little more heat and smoke and to give a little vinegar kick – recipe used lemon and lime juice only. Should I be worried about messing up the acid levels of this recipe?
Kristen, it appears that mango and papaya have similar pH values, so that substitution shouldn’t be a problem. Your addition of garlic and the increased amount of jalapeno concerns me though, as they’re both low acid ingredients. Did you increase the amount of onion as well? It may be that you’ve made the recipe unsafe.
@Leigh: I made ketchup earlier this week and I noticed that when I added the veggie puree (basically, the liquids left over after cooking tomatoes, onions and peppers down for 30 minutes and then ran it through a fine-mesh sieve), vinegar, sugar and spices it looked a heck of a lot like canned enchiladas sauce. I have a hunch that if you just altered the spices–keeping the total proportion the same–for a standard ketchup canning recipe and just skipped the cooking down process, you’d have shelf-stable enchilada sauce. Thoughts?
Hi Marisa. Great post and great comments. Anyone have a recommendation for a canning book that is more about the science behind canning? For instance, I recently made pickled onions. Ball Blue Book calls for a 5 minute simmer in brine before hot pack. Other recipe (from a blog) calls for dumping sliced onions into hot brine, let sit for 30 minutes (no heat) then can. Process time was longer on second recipe, but onions were not soggy and limp as they were with the first (I made them both). Both had more than 1:1 ratio of vinegar to water so I feel comfortable with their safety. So I’m trying to figure out when can I raw pack and when should I hot pack, and I don’t just want to follow a tested recipe, I want to know WHY and how doing one or the other changes processing times. And stuff like could I have pasteurized these pickles rather than boiled them (ala National Center for Home Food Preservation instructions for cucumber pickles). I have a science background. I understand the fundamentals. I want to know more. And I am often wanting to do a variation on a recipe that is not in any of the trusted resources (extention recipes and Ball Blue Book). Any ideas for me?
Like many of the other commenters, I just can whole, skinned tomatoes and then use them to make sauce later in the year. The particular sauce recipe we use needs to cook down quite a bit and it’s difficult to get that with more than a double batch in any case, and this way we don’t need to worry about botulism. I might also try my hand at canning tomato paste and salsa this summer.
Regarding pH meters, isn’t the issue in part that you need to make a slurry that has the exact ratios of ingredients in the can? That is, you can’t just dip a strip into the sauce, because unless you have pureed the onions, peppers, garlic, etc. their low acidity won’t be apparent in a test strip.
As with all things, it depends on the actual product. Sensitivity varies greatly depending on what the strips are marketed for, so you want to read up on what you are using, and calibrate when in doubt (i.e., measure the pH of some liquids with an all ready known pH).
The bigger problem that I have with those colour-coded pH papers is that when you are dipping them into a red liquid, it can be difficult/messy to read the result. I much prefer using my digital pH metre for canning. Its become my favourite accessory.
The pH in tomatoes themselves varies greatly, and is further impacted by how much you cook them down (i.e., how much water is cooked off). I just finished a batch of salsa, with no added acid but cooked down almost to a paste, whose pH came in at pH 3.1.
I just made the Ball Blue Book ‘Herbed Spaghetti Sauce’. It tastes fine. I thought if it needed jazzing up I’d do that as I used it. In the meantime I know I’ve got a good base made from local tomatoes. Yummers.
I use the tomato sauce recipe ian Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and always add the lemon juice. It’s a good basic sauce and I doctor it with whatever I want after I pop the lid.
Garden Girl mentioned fresh lemon juice vs. bottled. The reason I’ve heard/read in canning manuals and on the web for specifying bottled instead of fresh is that the bottled stuff is guaranteed to have a consistent level of acidity while fresh fruit may not. You may get a particularly sweet lemon with less acid or a more sour one that will alter the taste of the recipe.
My feeling is that if you take the time to understand the food science behind it (which is difficult when most canning instructions don’t tell you *why* can’t do certain things), you’ll feel more comfortable with the risk you’re taking when modifying a recipe. So, if you think fresh lemons in the quantity you’re using will be safe enough for you personally, go for it. If not, use the bottled stuff.
Marisa, thank you so much for giving the the pressure canner some attention. I have one and I absolutely love it. Pressure cookers/canners are nothing to be afraid of. I’m also much more comfortable modifying recipes when they’re being pressure canned because acidity isn’t really part of the preserving process (although most recipes still call for added acid as a safe-guard). The main idea behind pressure canning is that the food reaches a high temperature (about 240 degrees) for a long enough time to kill-off botulism spores, which are pretty much the only harmful microbes that can live over 212 degrees (boiling water). Making your food safe in a pressure canner is a matter of temperature, time, and the chunkiness or viscosity of your food–you want the heat to be able to penetrate to the center mass of the food.
The moral of the story is that if you’re trying to adapt a recipe for canning, you can do it with the least amount of risk by investing in a pressure canner. Just choose a canning recipe that’s the closest to what you’re making in terms of ingredients and follow the processing instructions for that. You’ll eventually figure out that most veggie recipes call for 45-60 minutes and anything with meat calls for 75-90 minutes.
I’m no scientist and I can’t guarantee that there’s NO risk, but I can tell you that I’ve been canning my own soup and stew recipes and my own marinara for over a year now and I trust it and feel safe. There’s nothing more satisfying than passing by the wall of Ragu in the megamart and opening a jar of homemade marinara for weeknight pasta. No defrosting–just heat and serve. And if you play your cards right, it’s cheaper too.
I prefer to use citric acid as I find that lemon juice gives a slightly off flavor. Red wine vinegar is a good option too, just make sure that the acidity of your vinegar is acceptable (some fancy vinegars actually don’t have a high enough acidity levels). And don’t use fresh lemon juice to acidify tomatoes (fine in jams & jellies though!). It’s ph is not standardized (lol).
What happens if you do can tomato sauce a bit varied from the recipe?
Like salsa or tomato sauce with more tomato paste?
I canned about a month ago and they are sitting on the pantry shelf.
Should I throw the contents out?
How would you be able to tell if the contents are poisoned?
Or can you not tell?
Thanks!
Linda
Linda, since you didn’t include additional acid lowering ingredients, you should probably be okay. However, I cannot guarantee that, as I wasn’t there when you were canning and don’t know the recipe you used. Unfortunately, the problem with botulism is that there’s no way to know whether it is present in your food when you open the jar. That’s why it is so incredibly dangerous. -Marisa
I tried a few different tomato sauce recipes over the past few years, and found all of them to be rather disappointing. So this year my compromise has been to simply can all my tomatoes as just plain tomato sauce (with absolutely nothing else added but the required added lemon juice). That way, I can just doctor up each individual jar as I need it, right before I use it. So far it’s worked out perfectly; plus, I’m not left trying to figure out how many jars of pasta sauce vs pizza sauce vs any other kind of sauce I should be putting up.
Gosh… I should proof my stuff. Sorry. First I made a delicious pizza sauce “one” year. And when referring to the hamburger, meat sauces, and soups, you can “pressure can” those for the longest time required (by ingredient) and you are okay, but she sure didn’t say I could do that.
Typo corrected! 😉 -Marisa
I made a delicious pizza sauce one year. Canned it like the recipe said. On a lark, I emailed the extension office for our county. She emailed me back and and said that due to the high olive oil content, I should freeze it. She did not mention that I had the option to pressure can, which I could have done because I do have a pressure canner. I’m still not sure why that wouldn’t work since you can can hamburger and even sauces with hamburger in them or soups. But, since I’m not a chemist, I didn’t take any chances and stuck it in the freezer. Definitely it didn’t work for a gift basket like I hoped, but ah well… it was still delicious!
Jeanna, it may have been that she didn’t realize that you had a pressure canner. Or because it wasn’t a tested pressure canning recipe, she didn’t know the processing time and pressure and didn’t feel like she could recommend them blindly. Extension offices like to follow the rules very precisely and don’t like to guess at all. -Marisa
I bought tomatoes yesterday to turn into sauce (my own are sitting green on the vine still) and when reading the ingredients out to the hubby he said “well that sounds bland and boring….” (he is the sauce maker in our house so has definite ideas about how it should be done) SOOO i am just going to peel and can some whole, and some crushed, and if the heat lets up i am going to make a paste out of some…thus giving the hubby the base for his sauce. because heck if he is going to poo-poo the tested recipes he can do the extra work come winter!
Regina, that sounds like a smart plan to me! -Marisa
THANK YOU for this! i have a lot of friends canning things willy nilly right now. this time of year seems to inspire people to hoard food for the winter. many of them are not experienced canners and wing it on a lot of things. i know its a rare thing, but its scary to think what could happen. i hope a lot of people who read this will think twice about experimenting!
I have an old family spaghetti sauce recipe that we have used for over 35 years (probably over 45 years) that is canned in a boiling water bath. It does not use wine, vinegar or any other addition like is discussed in this blog. We have never had an issue with it and I will continue to make this wonderful recipe as it is!!!
You don’t mention sugar as a possible ingredient – could that be the difference? Our recipe calls for the following: tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, parsley, bay leaf, oil, sugar, salt, and tomato paste.
Trudy, sugar does nothing to increase the acidity and safety of a recipe. Honestly, your recipe sounds highly unsafe to me. You’re very fortunately that you’ve had no problems with it over the years. -Marisa
…and if all else fails, you can freeze it.
You’re so right! I actually just froze some meat sauce this week, because I didn’t want to get into the business of hauling out the pressure canner and making it shelf stable. -Marisa
Could be a good idea to have a pHmeter at home if you want to know your pH exactly and done your canning safely 🙂
I look my pH often with “striptest” and/or pHmeter to have a control and be more creative… But I have both at home: pressure canner and boiling bath water. So I use the good one in regard of the pH that I obtain with my recipes 🙂
Manon, from what I’ve read, pH meters aren’t thought to be accurate enough for ensuring that home canned goods are safe. But it sounds like you know what you’re doing. -Marisa
Hi Marisa,
I absolutely love your blog, and am just getting into home canning. Your comment here on pH meters strikes me as odd, I have always been taught to use a pH meter to determine correct acidification and safety of foods. If this is not the proper method to determine a high acid food, what other options are out there that are more accurate? Thank you for everything that you have done here, you are running a beautiful site!
I’m one of those ‘science-minded’ folks she mentioned, so I’ll explain it to the best of my understanding. Using a pH meter to create/alter recipes has 2 basic problems.
The first is that if you’re dealing with a chunky recipe, the pH of each of the ingredients can vary greatly. What you measure may not be the actual pH of the whole product.
Problem 2 is that the pH may not remain stable throughout the storage time. For example, pickles generally use a 5% vinegar plus salt & water because the salt water brine causes the veg to create lactic acid, which can raise the acidity (and lower the pH) to as much as 20%. Pickles work because the acidity increases, other recipes may not because the reaction moves in the other direction, decreasing the acidity and raising the pH.
Hope this helps!
Winnie, I had the same question! I’m about to can 10 pints of Ashley English’s Tomato Basil Sauce tonight(18 pounds of peeled, cored tomatoes sitting at home in the fridge) and her recipe calls for balsamic and lemon juice,which I worry would ruin the tomato flavor. I think I’ll use an equivalent amount of red wine vinegar instead.
The recipe I used for canning cooked tomatoes was from Fine Cooking magazine, and called for citric acid. This worked well for me since we already had that on hand.
Anne, that’s a perfectly acceptable way to go. I rarely have citric acid on hand, so lemon juice has always just been easier for me. -Marisa
Do you have a favorite brand of bottled lemon juice that you use? I am assuming that you’re not talking about those plastic lemons with the green caps that you see in the produce section of the supermarkets. And, you prefer it (bottled) over juicing your own lemons at home, right? I’ve used lemon juice squeezed at home this year (my first forays into canning) with my sauce/butter/salsa… they’ll be okay?
Erin, most of the time I use the Santa Cruz Organic lemon juice that I can get at Whole Foods. They also carry another brand on occasion, and I’ve grabbed it at well (can’t remember the name at the moment) and it’s been just fine. I use bottled lemon juice for canning because of its consistent acidity. That consistency is the reason bottled is recommended over fresh for canning. When I’m working on other recipes that aren’t destined for the canner, I always use fresh. -Marisa
I’ve been wondering about a red enchilada sauce? Specially is the chemical that makes the chilies hot acidic?
Leigh, I’ve never made a red enchilada sauce for canning, so I don’t know. I believe it has vinegar in it though. I’ll check a cookbook later tonight and let you know if I learn anything groundbreaking. -Marisa
We always can our tomatoes then use then as needed throughout the year. Canning tomatoes is easy, and goes fairly quickly, and once you have quarts and quarts of tomatoes canned and stored, you can grab a jar or two and make your favorite sauce, salsa, add to stews, soups, chili, and casseroles, plain quarts of tomatoes are so very versatile and so very good.
No matter what we are canning we always follow the directions in the Ball Canning book.
That’s how I do it as well. I like the flexibility of the plain tomatoes. -Marisa
I haven’t canned tomato sauce, but I hope to do so if my tomatos ripen.
Thanks for the tip!
🙂 I’m actually really glad you wrote this- I started canning a few years ago, and the first thing seared into my brain was “follow a tested recipe!” At this point, I’ve only ever canned from Ball and Better Homes and Gardens 🙂 I just recently found your blog, and with all your recipes and such, I was curious how careful you were about following tested procedures, etc. Now I know! 🙂
Does it have to be lemon juice? Is adding an equivalent amount of vinegar ok? I canned a few jars of sauce using a Stocking Up recipe and used vinegar instead of lemon juice…now I am nervous.
Winnie, vinegar does the same thing as lemon juice, so your sauce should be just fine. Sorry to scare you, I should have specifically called out vinegar as another acceptable acid.
Actually, it is supposed to be double the amount of vinegar. Also vinegar can cause flavor changes.
http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_03/tomato_intro.html