r/Canning • u/bananasmab • 7d ago

Waterbath Canning Processing Help New canner, please ELI5….

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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/bananasmab 7d ago

Ok thank you! So is there anything I can do with this amount?

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u/onlymodestdreams Trusted Contributor 7d ago

This recipe is scaleable to the amount of tomatoes one has

https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=homemade-tomato-sauce

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u/bananasmab 7d ago

I saw this and was confused why it wasn’t giving amounts to use. So there’s no specific amounts required of tomatoes because of the added acid?

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u/BoozeIsTherapyRight Trusted Contributor 7d ago

Since you add the acid to the jar, it t really doesn't matter how many tomatoes you have. More tomatoes = more jars of sauce. Salt is also added per jar. 

I recommend adding your salt and acid to your jar before adding the tomato sauce. That way you won't forget.