Canning Spaghetti Sauce at Home

Canned Tomato Sauce from the Garden

*When canning spaghetti sauce with any herbs, you are going to need a pressure canner.

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Canning spaghetti sauce at home from your own garden tomatoes makes for wonderful family memories.

It is a great project to do with older kids, or with a friend and a goal for the day.

Maybe your goal is to put up 30 quart jars before 6 pm. Maybe your friends goal is to guide the kids in the process of picking their own tomatoes all the way to serving the sauce up on noodles for their very own dinner.

Either way, when canning spaghetti sauce, expect to work a bit and have a great time!

This recipe is for canning spaghetti sauce for tomato sauce or other tomato based foods using no meat, and either a water bath canner or a pressure canner.

This recipe is for your use with a very small amount of onion and jalapeno, either fresh from your kitchen or from Pasta Sauce Tomato Mix packets. (see the Amazon.com box below).

The packets make it very easy, but if you are adding your own onion and peppers while canning spaghetti sauce, remember that you cannot safely alter the amounts of these vegetables and still use the water bath method when canning spaghetti sauce.

When canning tomatoes for sauce, for stewed tomatoes or diced tomatoes, you must use a pressure canner if you are adding more vegetables or meat than this recipe calls for.

While you can do a great job canning spaghetti sauce in a pressure canner using lots of vegetables, we don't recommend adding meat. Meat that has been canned in sauce does not taste good. Add the meat to the sauce at meal preparation for much better results.

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Ingredients:

Canning Tomatoes- get 25 pounds. Yes, I know it is a lot, but you will be peeling, removing the seeds and in the process lose quite a bit of the water in the tomatoes.

You can buy packets of spaghetti sauce mix for about $3-$4 each. Ball, Harvest and Mrs. Wages all have seasoning packets online. You need one packet for every seven pints when canning tomato sauce.

Equipment and Supplies

Water Bath Home Canning Supplies:

First, you will need to get your equipment. Here are the basic reuseable home canning supplies for canning day. Prices are better over the internet than in local stores. If you are putting up vegetables or meat you will need a Pressure Canner.

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1. Large Water Bath Canner with Fitted Lid

Your canner needs to be wide and deep enough so your quart jars are submerged at 2" from the top. When I make a day of canning I want maximum efficiency and lots of jars put up at the end of the day, so I have three of these going at once.
Each water canner can hold only 6 quart jars each, so you will want to decide how much and how many you want to process at a time.They come with a wire cooling rack that not only keeps the jars from touching and possibly cracking each other, it also facilitates your bringing them up and out of the water without burning yourself or having to lift them out one by one.

2. Home Canning Supplies: Canning Jars:

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The mason jar is designed for canning and can be reused over many years if not damaged or cracked at the rim. They come in half pint, pint and quart sizes, the smaller most often used for foods you can pour, such as hot jams, jellies, apple sauces.
The quart sizes are good for foods that are chunky such as pickles, pears, peaches or vegetables. While you can use wide or regular mouth sizes for quart jars, I have found that it is easier to pack, fill and later serve from the wide mouth size when dealing with these foods.
Current home canning instructions recommend sterilizing jars before filling for food safetybr>Ball jars are a popular, safe canning supplies product to use for your food jars.You can find them at the best prices here.

3. Canning lids and Rings:

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Lids and ring sets are available when you get your ball jars. The lid is a cap with a seal on the underside, which is what ultimately keeps your food safe in storage.

You will need either wide or regular mouth size depending on what kind of jars you choose. Lids cannot be reused, however if you store your rings carefully you can reuse them safely.

When you need replacements you can find them at either online, or at hardware and grocery stores everywhere.

4. A Plastic Funnel:

Great for filling jars without making a mess. Especially for regular mouth size jars.

5. Jar and Lid Lifters

Lifts the jars out of the boiling water. One kind has black plastic lifters and the other resembles a wide set of tongs.
You will submerge the lids, in a pan, in very hot water. It is handy to have a magnetized lid lifter to pluck them out of the hot water when it is time to seal your jars.

6. Home Canning Lables

This is the fun part! You can order labels at very low prices on the internet. Whimsical, nostalgic, colorful, or your custom work, label your jars, date them and enjoy during the long winter months. Great for those jars going as gifts!

7. Spatulas or a long plastic knife:

The idea is to run through the jars to free up any trapped air bubbles in your jars.

8. Clean white dishcloth and Bath towel:

Use the dishcloth to wipe your jar rims of any food particles so your jars can seal properly. Set your hot processed jars on the bath towel to cool.

Canning Spaghetti Sauce

1. Remove the tomato skins by blanching them in boiling water for about 1 minute, followed by immersing in a big bowl of ice water. This makes it easy for you to slip the skins off the tomatoes, because when canning tomato sauce we certainly don't want skins in the mix.

2. Next up, slice the tomatoes into quarters, and then squeeze out the seeds and water.

3. Put the sliced tomatoes in a colander to continue draining while you keep chopping and squeezing the rest of the tomatoes. Save the liquid if you have use of some fresh tomato juice for breakfast or for other cooking projects.

4. I like to use my dishwasher to get the jars really spotless while I am boiling the water for the actual sterilization process, which comes after we make the sauce!

5. If you are using a mix, just follow the directions on the packet, remembering that sometimes these recipes call for vinegar rather than lemon juice.

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Recipe