A wonderfully flavored canned roasted tomato sauce that is safe to preserve in a boiling-water canner to be shelf stable. Having jars of this sauce in your pantry makes amazingly easy weeknight dinners that also makes any day remind you of summer!
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I’m super happy to be able to finally share this canned roasted tomato sauce that’s safe for boiling water bath canning with you! I have been searching for awhile for a recipe to safely water-bath can roasted tomato sauce, similar to our family’s favorite Roasted Tomato & Vegetable Sauce for Freezing, mainly for the convenience of having jars in the pantry ready to go for weeknight dinners. And this is a keeper for sure, taking a tested recipe and then adding the roasting step for the vegetables. It’s SO good!
Be Safe With Canning Tomato Sauce
However I do have to caution that you’ve got to be careful when searching the internet. I found quite a few “recipes” that didn’t list any specific amounts (“fill a pan with tomatoes, throw in a good handful of ______,” etc.) and then gave instructions for water-bath canning with the addition of citric acid.
Recipes like this are NOT considered safe by the USDA – adding citric acid to a concoction that is full of low-acid ingredients (olive oil, onions, garlic, fresh herbs and sometimes peppers), does not make it shelf-stable with boiling-water canning, especially when they’re not even measured amounts (see this article for more information).
I know that many people have canned this way for years, but in my opinion, it’s just food and never worth even a possibility of sickness. (Note: there’s a little more flexibility with sauces canned using a pressure canner, but it’s still recommended that you use a tested recipe.)
What About This Canned Roasted Tomato Sauce?
Okay, off my soapbox! After all that searching, are you wondering how I came up with this boiling water safe canned roasted sauce? Good for you for questioning – we should definitely educate ourselves when it comes to feeding our families.
Here’s the deal: I searched and searched and couldn’t find any roasted tomato sauce recipe that was safe for canning tomato sauce in a water bath canner. But then I wondered why I couldn’t just take the tomato sauce recipe from the Ball Blue Book that I’ve canned many times and instead of boiling the tomatoes, roast them instead. All the measured ingredients would be the same, only the cooking method would change.
This sounded like the solution to me, but to make sure I called the preservation hotline from our extension agency (Oregon State where I live) and asked them if they thought it would be okay. I told them I’d be sharing it with my blog readers – and they okayed the new cooking method! They just cautioned me to keep all the other low-acid ingredients the same and to be sure to include the addition of citric acid or lemon juice. Which I did, of course.
And guess what? It worked great and gave this sauce that nice roasted flavor that our favorite freezer sauce has. This is the sauce I’d been looking for!
How to Make Canned Roasted Tomato Sauce
Besides enhancing the flavor, one of the other reasons I like to roast tomatoes for sauces is because I can skip the boiling-water-peeling step since it’s easy to just pluck the darkened skins off after roasting. So even though it took 2 batches of roasting for this amount of sauce (I can only fit the three pans shown above in my oven at one time), it still took less time and work.
Note: Removing the skins is specified in the original recipe, so that’s what I do, but I leave skins on my favorite salsa and addictive tomato chutney, so you might choose to leave them on here. I haven’t found research to say it will affect the acid ratio. Just be sure your tomatoes are really clean.
So basically we’re skipping the peeling and initial cooking part and replacing that with pans of roasted ingredients. After your ingredients are roasted, though, you do need to bring it to a boil so it’s nice and hot for canning.
After roasting, you transfer everything into a large stockpot (this actually makes it easy to roast more pans to finish the full recipe – the first batch can wait in the pot for the second batch to roast).
When everything is roasted, I like to use my workhorse immersion blender to make a smooth sauce, but you can do it in batches with a blender or food processor, too – it’s just messier. After all the ingredients are in a large stock pot and blended, it’s just a matter of bringing to a boil again and then transferring to jars to can.
Tools I use For this Recipe:
- Food Scale
- Immersion Blender
- Stainless Steel Boiling Water Canner
- Stainless Steel Canning Funnel
- Stainless Steel Ladle
- Pint Mason Jars and Lids
A note on seeds: we don’t mind seeds in the sauce and I do squeeze out quite a few when I’m prepping the tomatoes for roasting, but if you’d prefer a seedless sauce, you can strain the sauce after you’ve whirred it up – it’s up to you.
Here’s a video on the simple steps for boiling water canning if you need:
Or you can go to this article and read the steps with photos.
Oh, and I should mention that I took the in-process photos above before I realized that I should add all the other ingredients to the roasting pans first and then place the tomatoes on top of them. This makes it easier to pluck the skins off without losing any of the spices or other ingredients. Just in case you are, like, “hey that’s not what’s in the picture.” Gotta keep you all on your toes!
I hope you enjoy this as much as we do!
Click the arrow for the full Canned Roasted Tomato Sauce recipe (with print options)!
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Sandy says
October 3 at 3:06 pmAmazing! This is exactly how I make my roasted tomato sauce (minus the precise measurements) and its the most awesome sauce ever. I have a batch on the stove as we speak, getting ready to can. I decided to check real quick and make sure I was being “safe” and yours is the first recipe that came up. Like I said, I make mine pretty much exactly the same as you do!
I usually don’t add the lemon juice – I will this time just to make doubly sure I’m safe – because I use litmus strips to check the Ph before I can any kind of tomato sauce. My tomatoes must be pretty acid because it always tests at or below Ph 4.
Thank you for publishing this.
Jami says
October 7 at 10:39 amI’m so glad this was helpful to you, Sandy! And using the strips is great – the citric acid/lemon juice is just a precaution and if you know your Ph, you wouldn’t need to add it.
Carol Fierro says
September 18 at 5:01 amI made your Roasted Tomato Sauce the other day. It turned out so good and it even looks beautiful in the canning jars.I made 7 quarts and 1 pint.
Your recipe is a keeper for sure. I love the roasting of the tomatoes and so easy to remove their skins.
Jami says
September 23 at 11:02 amYay! Agree that the roasting adds another layer of flavor. 🙂
Martha says
September 14 at 5:45 pmI’m confused. Where is the recipe — I guess I go to another site. But, more importantly, what is the roasting time that you used? Unless, I missed it…. Thanks.
Jami says
September 15 at 11:37 amClick the arrows on the top or bottom to go to the full, printable recipe!
Zelda says
August 30 at 6:24 amRgarding the skins: remove them. Even well-washed tomatoes have microscopic textures and crevices which can harbor botulism spores. Botulism spores are NOT killed by boiling, only by the higher temperatures found in pressure canners.
Jami says
August 30 at 10:43 amHmm, I tried to look up that and couldn’t find anything about that. Botulism from canning is VERY rare (like a handful of cases a year) and then it’s usually always improperly canned foods that should be pressure canned like vegetables and meats. Tomatoes canned with added acid are too high in acid to allow botulism to grow. But definitely skin your tomatoes if you’d like!