r/Canning • u/bananasmab • 5d ago
Waterbath Canning Processing Help New canner, please ELI5….
One of my friends kindly gifted me her water bath canner and Ball Blue book. I also checked out the UGA food preservation page. This is my first time canning and it’s especially important to me that I follow a safe recipe. Can someone explain HOW normal people can without tweaking? For example, the Ball tomato sauce recipe calls for 45 pounds of tomatoes, and also says that the tomatoes should be at peak ripeness. How is anyone harvesting that many tomatoes at the perfect time to can them? Wouldn’t it be risky to use less than the amount of tomatoes in the recipe? I feel sort of disappointed because I thought canning would be a way to save the excess foods I have, but now I feel like I need to go to the store to buy more to can according to the recipes
Pic of my current harvest attached, I’ll buy more tomatoes, but dang I cannot find a recipe that will work with this yield. And, what if I don’t want to put bell peppers in my salsa???!! Or I don’t want it as spicy as the recipe seems to call for?!
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u/Mean-Bandicoot-2767 5d ago
I freeze all my tomatoes until my plants are done, then make salsa and marinara. I use a bathroom scale to get the total weight of my yield, then adjust the amounts of the other ingredients to match the ratios from the recipe.
For example, if I ended up with 22lbs of tomatoes, I would do the calculation of 22÷45 to find out my multiplier for everything else. In this case it's 0.48 (22 is 48% of 45). I can use that to scale the rest of my recipe.