I’d like to preface this by saying: I know very little about canning. I’ve done some water-bath canning successfully, and I recently purchased a pressure canner. This was my first attempt at making sauce, and I just want to share the process with you, mostly in pictures. It’s not meant to be a tutorial, but perhaps an inspiration!
We began by going to a local farm to pick tomatoes.
Lydia loved helping out!
We picked some peppers as well.
We also purchased a few items at the farmer’s market to prepare our sauce. I used about 10 – 12 pounds of tomatoes, two large red onions, one red pepper, one green pepper, a large bunch of basil, a head of garlic, salt, and pepper.
I took the tomatoes and made an X at the bottom and cut out the core.
Then I boiled the tomatoes briefly and peel them. I chopped the tomatoes and all the other ingredients and cooked them down in a pot for several hours. I used a stick blender to puree it before jarring.
Again, I know very little about canning. I’ll just skip to the part where my husband read the instruction booklet and helped me use the pressure canner.
Success!! Here’s the result!
Love this, we won’t be getting fresh veggies for months..waiting on snow to melt! Sauce looks yummy!
Thank you! It was delicious. I love that our growing season begins in December in South Florida.
We have also made great use of a food dehydrator for excess tomatoes. After they are dried, I put them in zip lock freezer bags and freeze them. So we have dried tomatoes for well over a year to put in all of our recipes and they take up very little space in the freezer.
I need to look into purchasing both a food dehydrator and an extra freezer for our garage. Both would be so helpful in storing/preparing food to last all year long!
I was hoping for a tutorial sans the pressure cooker. We just started a garden and this is one of the things I want to ‘learn’ or ‘attempt’ to do. I’m NO good in the kitchen but my huppie friends inspire me. 😉
Start by doing a quick Google search for canning jam – that’s the best way to start and requires minimal equipment 🙂