Having successfully mastered homemade jams, I’m now thinking about putting up my spaghetti sauce in jars to free up freezer space. I’ve looked on 4 different sites for instructions and have gotten 4 different sets of instructions, including processing times ranging from 15 to 50 minutes.
HELP!!
First question - is there any reason I couldn’t use my own recipe for sauce? Everywhere I looked provided recipes, and since I just made a huge batch, I don’t need to make any more right now.
Second - how long do I boil the sealed jars under water? My jams only required 10 minutes - why would an acidic sauce require five times that long?
Third - my husband suggests I can this batch, then wait a month and give our daughter a jar to try before we have any - should I tell her what her dad said???
Thanks in advance for the anticipated enlightenment!
If you want to do it safely, you either need to use a pH meter to check if it’s acidic enough to just do the regular water bath method, or whether you need to get a pressure canner to make sure you kill any possibility of botulism. Or, you could just freeze it.
Now, I’ve survived with my mother never pressure canning anything, and I’m sure some of her foods did not meet the pH threshold, but I cannot recommend doing that. Botulism is rare in the US, but it almost always caused in non-commercial food items, often in home-canned foods, improperly preserved. Cite.
**pulykamell **- I kept searching and came across an article that said you should use pressure canning because of the pH issue. I don’t have a pressure cooker, so I’m guessing this batch will end up in the freezer - fortunately, zip bags are easy to fit in tight spaces, because my freezer is jammed.
In the interest of not poisoning my family and/or guests, I guess I’ll just freeze this batch and thing about whether I want to buy a pressure cooker or not. Thanks!
Two weekends ago, I did a batch of stewed tomatoes by open kettle, and all I did was time them for 10 minutes at a rolling boil. Each jar had salt and lemon juice added to ensure acidity and brininess.
I would say that if your sketty sauce is just tomatoes, onions, and herbs, open kettle would be fine. I have many jars of homemade salsa of similar makeup, and those were open kettled, too. However, should you put meat or non-acidic veggies in your sauce, you will need a pressure canner.
The problem with tomatoes is that they are right on the borderline between safe and unsafe acidity. Most tomato-based water-bath recipes add extra acid for safety; if you don’t add extra acid (lemon juice or citric acid, usually), it’s not possible to know (without testing) whether a particular batch is or isn’t safe.
OP, do you have a vacuum sealer? If no, I highly recommend one if you do a lot of freezing. You wont have to worry as much about cycling your goods, because vacuum sealed frozen items will last a year+ before getting freezerburn. On mother’s day of this year I made a fruit crumble from rhubarb and strawberries I sealed the previous June. It was just as good as the day I froze it.
The recipes you find will probably have acid (lemon juice/vinegar) in them to ensure the sauce is acidic enough to process in jars without using a pressure canner, so unless your homemade sauce includes acid you do need to use a recipe.
Most jams are fine without hot water processing at all, that ten minutes was insurance, not actual processing time. The processing time for real canning is based on the size of the jars as well as the kind of contents (thick takes longer than watery), so you’ll need to boil the jars for tomato sauce at least 30 minutes if not longer.
I appreciate the info, and regarding the recommendations to freeze, that’s what I’ve done up till now. I was just hoping to free up some limited freezer space by putting the sauce up in jars. Instead, I’ll rearrange my freezer and find space for my latest batch.
