Canning Tomato Sauce
Your Guide to Canning Tomato Sauce
If you raise your own tomatoes in your garden and have excess tomatoes that would otherwise go to waste, then canning tomato sauce can be a real benefit. Canning is a good way to keep your tomatoes fresh and to experiment with new sauce recipes. There is, however, an initial expense in terms of equipment, so this is not for tomato dilettantes who are just growing tomatoes for the first time. If however, you are known as the “tomato girl” among your acquaintances this is definitely for you.
Pick Good Tomatoes
The first step to canning tomato sauce is picking nice healthy tomatoes from you garden. Avoid tomatoes that look diseased or you may risk ruining your sauce. Also, be sure that your tomatoes are not too ripe as this may have a negative affect on the flavor of the final product.
Prepare Tomatoes for Canning: Removing Skin and Cores
Once you have a good number of tomatoes you will want to wash and examine them carefully to make sure that they are not carrying any parasites. Nothing ruins a good tomatoes sauce more then a crunchy bite into a tomato bug that slipped by your initial inspection.
Now you will need to remove the skin and cores of your tomatoes. To do this, boil you tomatoes in water until the skin becomes loose. This usually takes about ten minutes in pre-boiled water. To make sure they are ready, fish out one tomato and give it a little squeeze. Be careful not to burn yourself!
The tomatoes skin should feel loose like a wrapper. If it has reached this stage, dump you tomatoes in the coldest water you can. You want to arrest the cooking process as quickly as possible. Some pros fill their sinks with half ice, half tap water at the beginning of boiling to make sure cooking completely stops.
Now surgically remove the cores of your red little red beauties and peel your tomato skins. Some people like to use these items in other recipes like tomato-flavored breads or chips but you shouldn’t use them in canning.
Seeding
In a mechanical juicing sieve, remove the seeds. Some people prefer to do this in a manual sieve but I find these both less efficient in terms of time and results.
Saucing
Transfer the contents of the sieve into a large saucepot and boil it gently for about two and a half hours or until your sauce has achieved the texture and consistency you would like. Towards the end of this saucing process is when you want to add any ingredients—like garlic for example—that you would like to help flavor your sauce.
Recipe Tip
Here is one of my favorite and easy to make recipes. About an hour before your sauce is done add diced carrots, onions, celery bits and diced garlic cloves. Then, just before jarring, add salt, pepper, and paprika--the more, the spicier.
Canning Tomato Sauce
Using a funnel pour your sauce into your sauce jar. If you are looking to sell your sauce to a local store or at a farmer’s market, you may want to choose different sized jars with unusual shapes to add to your sauce’s unique appeal. In addition, lightly tinted glass will also help you distinguish your sauce from store bought varieties.
Boil your jar lids for a couple of minutes to make them malleable and then band them shut.
Labeling
For added professional effect when canning tomato sauce, get labeling software for your computer and paste your original labels with your own graphics and lettering. It can create both a professional, hand-made, and rustic look for your sauce.