Canning -- pressure canning pasta sauce

My lovely bride of twenty-four years made a huge batch of spaghetti sauce for the church youth group. She found that she could buy a big number 10 can of tomato sauce at our local King Soopers for a really good price and she could make 2 gallons of pasta sauce from that. The youth and all of the adults loved it.

So, having been raised by a couple of smart, intelligent depression era parents, I was taught how to can. My wife says, hey I can make another batch and you can put it up in the canning jars.

The following week I came home from work to the wonderful, smell of pasta sauce simmering on the stove.

I pulled out the quart jars. Our pressure canner will do 7 quarts, so that leaves a quart for dinner. We filled the jars, I used to have a canning funnel but in our moves, hither, tither and yon, I have lost it or given it away. The filling job is just a bit more work without the funnel.

If you have not pressure canned, do not be intimidated by the thought. All extension offices have information that can help as well as the instruction booklets for the pressure canner itself.

My wife's sauce is a marinaria sauce so no meat is involved. A meat sauce would need to be processed longer than a tomato based sauce.

We put the bottom rack into the pressure canner. We then added two quarts of warm/hot water. Then we placed the 7 quart jars onto the bottom rack. We confirmed the rubber gasket was in good shape and in place around the top of the pressure canner. We placed the pressure canner lid onto the pressure canner and closed the lid. Then we place the pressure canner valve onto the lid. Under 2000 feet and we would use 5 pounds of pressure for our canning experience. We however, are just over 'a mile high in Denver', thanks Jimmy Buffet, so we use 10 pounds of pressure.

We put the pressure canner on the stove and turn it up between medium and high. The pressure canner steams, spits and sputters around the handle until it gets close to the pressure needed, then.... the handle drops down and locks into place. A few minutes later and the valve starts to jiggle. About twenty minutes later and the jiggle is vigorous. We start timing. We want to let the pressure canner operate at this temperature and pressure for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes we take it from the stove and let it cool down on some towels for about thirty minutes. After the cool down the lid is cool enough for the lock handle to release and be lifted off. The jars are then removed and placed on towels to continue their cool down. After another thirty minutes, pop, pop is heard the sound of the lids sealing off. We left the jars out on the towels overnight and in the morning a simple test feel of the lids showed them all to have sealed. We did both a spoon test, take a spoon and lightly tap the lid for a tin sound. And a feel to see that the lids did not move up and down.

So a #10 can of tomato sauce, a couple of cans of tomatoes and some spices that only my wife knows for sure. Two hours worth of work with the pressure canner, about thirty of involvement and the rest waiting. We have seven quarts of homemade sauce for about the cost of a quart of sauce at the store.

Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Hang in there, have fun and enjoy.

Mark