Water-Bath Safe Canned Roasted Tomato Sauce

 

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)!