How to make and can homemade spaghetti sauce from fresh tomatoes

Making and canning your own spaghetti sauce is something families remember years later. No store bought spaghetti sauce compares with the taste of that made from your own tomatoes from your garden or fresh-picked from a local farm! In the middle of the winter, you can make a meal with your spaghetti sauce and taste the summer flavor of fresh tomatoes. This recipe is for spaghetti sauce WITHOUT meet - you can add meats, but that requires a pressure canner and a different set of directions (see this page for directions for spaghetti sauce with meat)

Here's how to do it, in easy steps and completely illustrated. This method is so easy, ANYONE can do this! It's a great thing to do with your kids!

Ingredients and Equipment

Process - How to Make Spaghetti Sauce from Fresh Tomatoes

Step 1 - Selecting the tomatoes

At right is a picture of tomatoes from my garden - they are so much better than anything from the grocery store. And if you don't have enough, a pick-you-own farm is the pace to go! At right are 4 common varieties that will work:

Top left: Beefsteak	Top right: Lemon Boy, yellow
Bottom left: Roma, paste-type	Bottom right: Better Boy

The picture at right shows the best variety of tomato to use: Roma; also called paste tomatoes. They have fewer sides, thicker, meatier walls, and less water. And that means thicker sauce in less cooking time!

Step 2 - Removing the tomato skins

Here's a trick you may not know: put the tomatoes, a few at a time in a large pot of boiling water for no more than 1 minute (30 - 45 seconds is usually enough)

This makes the skins slide right off of the tomatoes! If you leave the skins in, they become tough and chewy in the sauce, not very pleasant.

Step 3 - Removing seeds and water

After you have peeled the skins off the tomatoes, cut the tomatoes in half. Now we need to remove the seeds and excess water.

Step 4 - Squeeze of the seeds and water

Just like it sounds: wash your hands then squeeze each tomato and use your finger or a

spoon to scoop and shake out most of the seeds. You don't need to get fanatical about it; removing just most will do.

Step 5 - Drain the tomatoes

Toss the squeezed (Squozen? :) tomatoes into a colander or drainer, while you work on others. This helps more of the water to drain off. You may want to save the liquid: if you then pass it through a sieve, screen or cheesecloth, you have fresh tomato juice; great to drink cold or use in cooking! By draining the water off now, you'll end up with a thicker spaghetti sauce in less cooking time! And that preserves vitamins (and your sanity).

Step 6 - Get the jars and lids sterilizing

The dishwasher is fine for the jars. I get that going while I'm preparing everything else, so it's done by the time I'm ready to fill the jars.

Note: everything gets sterilized in the water bath (step 7)
anyway, so this just helps to ensure there is no spoilage later!)

Step 7. Mix or your own seasoning?

Either works equally well. The spaghetti sauce mix for canning has the advantage of being tested and VERY easy to use. It's basically corn starch, onion powder, salt and seasoning. It doesn't have any preservative to improve the canning, so the advantage is just that it is easier. Remember, this recipe is for NO meat! (see this page for directions for spaghetti sauce with meat)

A note about spices: Less spice, especially garlic and onions in canned sauce is better. They te

nd to strengthen and sometimes become bitter in storage. So use less when you prepare the sauce and add more when you actually use it, if you want!

Step 8 - Combine and bring the sauce to a gentle simmer

Combine the tomatoes and spices together in a big pot. There's generally no need to add liquid, most types of tomatoes have so much water, we will need to boil it down to drive off much of the water to thicken the sauce. If your tomatoes are watery, boil it down before you add the spices, to avoid them becoming too strong.

You don't need to overcook it; just bring it to boiling to sterilize it, mix the seasonings and cook down the tomatoes.

Step 9 - Fill the jars with sauces and put the lid and rings on

Fill them to within 1/4 inch of the top, seat the lid and hand-tighten the ring around them.

NOTE: if you want to freeze the sauce instead, just fill your freezer containers (I like Ziploc freezer bags in the quart size), fill them completely, eliminate air pockets, seal them and pop them in the freezer. You're done!

Be sure the contact surfaces (top of the jar and underside of the ring) are clean to get a good seal!

Step 10 - Boil the jars in the canner

Put them in the canner and keep them covered with at least 1 inch of water. Keep the water boiling. Process the jars in a boiling-water bath for 35 minutes for pints and 40 minutes for quarts. If you have a pressure canner, use it and process the sauce for 30 minutes for pint jars and 35 minutes for quarts, at a pressure of 10 to 11 pounds. Remember to adjust the time if you are at a different altitude other than sea level! Pressure canners work better for tomatoes and other low acid photos - you'll get less spoilage with a pressure canner.

I prefer a pressur

e canner (see photo below) or a larger 33 quarter water bath canner, shown at right - it is much deeper, so it is neater, no boilovers, and allows you to cover the tallest jars with several inches of water to ensure safety! To order one, click on Canning supplies and select the canner that is right for your stove (regular or flat bottomed for glass or ceramic stoves)

Step 9 - Done

Lift the jars out of the water and let them cool without touching or bumping them in a draft-free place (usually takes overnight) You can then remove the rings if you like.

Other Equipment:

Summary - Cost of Making Homemade Spaghetti Sauce - makes 7 pint jars, 16 oz each*
Item	Quantity	Cost in 2006	Source	Subtotal
Tomatoes	20 - 25 lbs (to make about 16 cups of prepared tomato)	free from the garden, or $0.50 cents at a PYO	Garden	$0.00
Canning jars (pint size, wide mouth), includes lids and rings	7 jars	$8.00/dozen	Wal-Mart, BigLots, Publix, Kroger	$4.50
seasoning	See step 7	$2.00?	Wal-Mart, Publix, Kroger	$2.00
Spaghetti mix	1 packet	$3.00 per package	Wal-Mart, BigLots, Publix, Kroger
Total				$6.50 total or about $0.95 per jar INCLUDING the jars - which you can reuse!
* - This assumes you already have the pots, pans, ladles, and reusable equipment. Note that you can reuse the jars! Many products are sold in jars that will take the lids and rings for canning. For example, Classico Spaghetti sauce is in quart sized jars that work with Ball and Kerr lids and rings. Note that the Classico's manufacturer does not recommend reuse of their jars: see what they have to say on this page:

Answers to Common Questions

Tomatoes are a low acid fruit - adding lemon juice helps, processing at least 35 minutes in the water bath canner, or better still, using a pressure canner almost eliminates spoilage. If you don't have a pressure canner, you must boost the acid level of the sauce, by adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid per quart of sauce.

With a water bath canner, absolutely, definitely NOT. The temperatures do not get high enough to kill the type of bacteria that can attack meat and make you sick, or even kill you. However, with a pressure canner, it IS possible. I have complete directions here! I don't do it, simply because... have you ever tasted canned meat? Yes, it is called SPAM. My recommendation is to can without the meat and add fresh browned ground meat or meatballs when you use the sauce!

I have read in other homemade spaghetti sauce recipes that you need to cook the mixture for at least 4-5 hours. Is this necessary?

I suppose if you really want to make sure that absolutely no vitamins survive, you could cook it that long! :) The only reason people used to tomato sauce that long was the Roma paste-type tomatoes, with thicker walls, meatier with fewer seeds and less water didn't exist, so they had to cook it for hours to get rid of water and thicken it. And of course, modern sauce mixes that contain a little bit of corn starch as a thickener, also help shorten the time.

And for those who want to go strictly organic and au naturale, my method of squeezing out the excess water and seeds eliminates much of the excess juice (which you can save as tomato juice for drinking) and lets you start with a thicker tomato pulp which means much shorter cooking time!

Making and Canning (or freezing) Homemade Spaghetti Sauce from Fresh Tomatoes!

Ingredients and Equipment