A few weeks ago we Canned some of our tomatoes into sauce. I’m going to say right off the bat, that this post is NOT a tutorial, nor will I link the tutorial I attempted to use. As…well….things didnt go that great.
The whole process was very messy, kinda fun, very confusing, and a little expensive. I needed a little grandma to help me! None the less it took us about 5 hours and we made 6 jars of sauce that taste like watered down tomato salsa.
Our tomato crop wasn’t very good to begin with. All the tomatoes were just super mealy, even if they were firm. Rain water-logged a lot of them too. I probably wont do tomatoes again, or maybe just one plant of vine tomatoes (which are the only ones I really like). So far we used our sauce to make a pizza, which was really good, although I don’t know that the sauce has much to do with it. I think if we made spaghetti that we would need to add a lot of tomato paste to make it thick enough.
Oh and when we Boiled them (we don’t have a pressure cooker) they didn’t really fully seal until the next morning, which no one told me and at first I thought the whole thing was a giant waste. There may have been some cursing…just saying.
Needless to say it was a learning experience!
We got a food dehydrator for the wedding, which is very exciting, I just need to find time to use it. I might do some apples slices! I consider every bit of “homemaking” we do at the very least a learning experience. I might sometimes fail, but at least I tried.
The Family Chapters 
Learning to can is definitely an experience! Tyler and I canned tomato sauce this year but we added onions, garlic, eggplant, etc. and plan to add it to spaghetti or lasagna. It is a little runny but not too bad. Yours may have just been runny from the bad tomatoes. We didn’t pressure cook ours either but we did have them in the water bath for 40 minutes or so they sealed rather quickly after starting to cool. It is really important to water bath long enough to avoid botulism! Don’t lose hope yet, our first canning experience was awful!
Don’t give up. Have another go. Good tomatoes and a flavoursome recipe help.