Tonight I opened a large plastic jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce for the first time. Bought it 2 weeks ago? It appeared to have been sealed well. I shook it a bit before opening.
Luckily I had it over the pan. There was a surprising release of pent up pressure. Even splattered me a bit as soon as the lid was cracked open.
Then it got really weird. I poured a bit in the pan over cooked ground beef. Tipped it back. And it kept coming out. And kept coming out more… The jar was barely tilted and the sauce kept on coming up and out of the jar. I waited a few moments thinking it would stop, or a big air bubble would belch up and end it. But it just kept expanding up and out of the jar. A LOT of it. I put the lid under the edge and swung around and dumped the rest into the sink. As I tipped it into the sink I could see that it was still all the way up to the rim and still expanding out. A lot had already ended up in the pan, but still a lot ended up in the sink. At a very rough estimate, it seemed to be double the amount I would expect to be in the jar. Regret that I did not just set it in the sink to witness the full event play out. No trapped air bubble seemed to bubble out.
I took a sniff of the remnants in the jar. It had an acidic smell? Maybe like wine? Hard to say with all the spices involved that aren’t in wine and such.
I can easily imagine fermentation taking place by some accident. But the expansion factor was amazing. Similar thing happened to anyone else? Search turned up nothing like it, sauce related.
So dumped the beginnings of dinner. Donned my face mask and went and got wings.
It may have been past best before date. Not sure of the label format.
You said there were no bubbles? I believe (a home brewer might prove me wrong) fermentation would have resulted in a buildup of C02 bubbles. It would have sounded like opening a can of soda or beer and there would have been fizzy bubbles.
It sounds like you may have dodged a serious food-borne illness. One of the signs of botulism is pressure buildup in the container. That’s why bad cans will bulge outwards. Good call tossing it, and you probably want to bleach everything the sauce touched just to be safe.
No obvious bubbles. But the sauce is thick. So small bubbles may not be visible. The way it kept expanding may have been due to a lot of small bubbles being created? It instantly released a lot of pressure. A very surprising amount. It squirted sauce out of the still in place lid. I guess it might have been like sauce foam? A lot of very small bubbles? I will take the lid back to the store and inform them.
Pretty good wings. Salt and pepper. Have a great, cheap pizza place two blocks away. Kind of funny that it is owned and operated by Asian folks. Good prices, decent pizza and wings. Often a payday Friday night meal. Pepperoni and Feta pizza, salt and pepper wings.
Write you a snappy email to the Ragu peeps. Be sure and list the amount of money you lost on the ground beef and noodles, and a nice Chianti and bread. Add your dangerous trip to get wings in the days of social distancing. And your near miss of a food born illness.
I bet they’ll send you a coupon for a free jar of Ragu sauce:smack:
Definitely make an effort to find the jar and inform the manufacturer of the above information. When buying anything perishable in a sealed jar (essentially, “canned” goods as in home canning in mason jars) you should always check for the top being slightly depressed due to the partial vacuum that should be in there. It’s not always particularly obvious but it should be there. And opening the jar will usually create an audible “pop” when the vacuum seal is released.
What you’re describing is the opposite and sounds truly scary. I’ve never ever heard of anything like this happening (but yes, it’s true that metal cans whose contents have developed botulism may bulge for just that reason). That stuff may have been really dangerous. You really should make every effort to notify the manufacturer with the pertinent data on the jar, though it’s likely this was a one-off and not a batch problem or we’d probably be hearing more about it. It may help prevent a tragedy, and you’ll probably get free goodies out of it, too.
When I make ginger ale (water, sugar, steeped & strained ground ginger liquid, lemon juice, yeast) I want it to ferment and make CO2 in a sealed plastic soda bottle for a couple of days at room temperature. The bottle changes from flexible when squeezed to very tense over that time. Then I refrigerate it. CO2 dissolves more easily into cold liquid than warm.
When it comes time to open it and drink some, the amount of froth that wants to leap out of the top can be ridiculous. Because the solution is quite cloudy with ginger particles and stray lemon pulp there are a lot of places in the bottle for a bubble to form, called nucleation sites. When the cap is loosened much of the CO2 that used to be crammed into solution by the internal pressure gets free and is ready to party. Giving the bottle a shake before opening also helps the CO2 come out of solution when the pressure is reduced.
Other than the gross do not eat aspect, I would love to see the same thing happen in pasta sauce. I would be very worried about the glass jar exploding, though, since it isn’t shaped to hold pressure. You dodged a couple of bullets.
See: Mentos & Diet Cola on your favourite video sharing site.
They’ll usually do better than that. Once I opened a 6-oz can of tomato paste to make into spaghetti sauce and there was a big air bubble in the can. It was the only can I had on hand and it looked okay, unlike Kedikat’s jar o’ death so I used it, but I weighed it first and, as expected, it came to somewhat less than 5 ounces.
This was decades ago, well before camera phones, so I took no pictures but sent an email detailing what had happened along with the date code and that the sauce had tasted kind of thin. I wasn’t really expecting anything, just they they might want to check for more short fills in that lot, but I got several coupons for six cans, free along with a thank you letter…
Sent an email to the company.
Copied my post into it. With their date code. Product details. Location of purchase, etc…
Told them not to worry about refund or anything.
I opened a can of Hunt’s tomato sauce once just to have the whole thing foam and bubble all over the place, like I’d opened a shaken bottle of warm Pepsi. Dumped that sapsucker quick, found a normal can.
Drawing on my memories of the TV show How It’s Made, I think the pasta sauce goes into the jar pretty near boiling then they spin the lid on and as it cools it pulls the vacuum that makes the “Lid pops up when opened” anti-tamper seal work.
And if it’s going into a steel can it gets filled with product, the lid is crimped, the whole can is boiled for N minutes, then the label goes on.
Hunts, Ragu, and I would sure like to know at what point the yeast or bacteria got in there.
I had a small open jar of bruschetta sauce in the fridge that fermented. It looked fine, and I wasn’t in the habit of sniffing recently-opened things at the time, so I didn’t notice anything was amiss until I ate some. It had a distinctive fizziness, and while it was still flavorful, there was a hint of alcohol in the background. I didn’t get sick from the amount I ate.
The OP did the right thing to chunk the contents of the previously unopened jar though.
Shame there’s no video, this sounds ripe for Fail Blog.
I’m curious of the expiration date since you said it seemed well sealed. I once bought some angel food cake at the store, and half way into it I noticed something off-color at the bottom. After cutting into it a bit more I found it was all moldy. It was a good month past its expiration date, and this is not the type of thing I would’ve thought to check since it’s always soft and spongy. Needless to say I was not happy since I had just purchased it in the last day or two.
Beyond that, it’s possible your jug wasn’t sealed well, despite appearances. I happened to notice one of my cans of green beans was dented (not an unusual thing) but the lid looked like it was perhaps breached. I opened it to see what the inside looked like, and while it didn’t look bad (the water was kind of milky but otherwise ok), the smell was gag-inducing. Anything that’s meant to be hermetically sealed but isn’t, won’t last long at room temperature.
I do think the “many small bubbles” theory is the right one, though what actually created them is another story. I made pasta sauce a couple weekends ago and added just a smidge of baking soda to cut down the acidity and sourness. My smidge was too big though (like I should’ve used 1/8 teaspoon instead of 1/4), and it really foamed up the sauce (and made it too salty). It was weird though, it didn’t look bubbly per se, nor did it rise much in the saucepan, but while stirring it felt like it lost half its mass and I was stirring whipped cream and not tomato sauce. I doubt your sauce was overloaded with baking soda, but it illustrates that tomato sauce tends to foam in a non-obvious way in acid/base or fermentation reactions.
A little vinegar and brown sugar cut back the excess saltiness, and from day two and beyond the sauce was quite good.
