Here was my process.
1.Put Roma tomatoes into boiling water for 1 min.
2. Immediately into cold water. Peeled, cored, then quartered.
3. Into a pint jar, with 1/2 tsp kosher salt and 1 tbsp bottled lemon juice.
4. Repeated steps 1-3 two more times until I had 8 pint jars filled about 1/2” from the top. 5. Stirred jars to try and get air to top. Cleaned the rims and capped with new caps that had been sitting in hot water. Put on lids, finger tight, although I probably could have tightened them more just by hand (was this a mistake??)
6. That whole process probably took 45 mins to fill 8 jars- remember this was my first time. Was that too long and possibly caused the tomatoes to cool down too much?
7. Put all 8 capped jars in a pot, topped with hot water from the sink about an inch over the cans, the brought to a boil. Started a timer for 60 mins.
8. When time was up, I pulled all of the jars and noticed that they separated quite a bit. None of the jars lids had “popped” at this point (I think that’s normal?). My first thought was, ”dang! somehow the water from the pot got into the jars”. At this point I thought I blew it, but I flipped the jars over and there was still the same, about 1/2” of head space. Then I proceeded to tighten all of the lids more, and although they didn’t “pop” the lids all sucked in and I could no longer depress them. Possibly another mistake?
What do you think, are the safe? Did I ruin them?
I see 3 scenarios from best case to worst case:
A. They are good to go and can be stored and used within a few months, or longer?
B. Canning failed, but if I put them in the fridge they’ll be good to use within the week
C. They are bad and need to be tossed.
Hoping for A, but what do you all think? This was mainly and experiment but I’d like to be able to do this properly because I have tons more tomatoes that need to be picked soon.
Thanks for any insight!
by nh-603
3 Comments
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The liquid and solid will integrate on the shelf.
You were good until you flipped them over and tightened the lids. Jars can take a little while to seal. When you remove them from the canner, you’re not supposed to touch them for 24 hours. By flipping, you can create a false seal through a vacuum effect. Same thing with tightening. You squished the lids down while the rubber was still hot, so this can seal the lid to the jar but it’s not actually a properly sealed can.
Tomatoes separate a lot. There’s a lot of water content in them. They’ll pretty much always look like this. You can put these in the fridge, but it hasn’t been very long so you can also reprocess them using new lids. They might get pretty mushy if you do this, but if you’re using them for soups or sauces that really shouldn’t matter.