First time canner here, I took a picture of the Ball recipe I followed (ratio wise, I did roast everything in the oven then just immersion blended it instead of cooking the sauce down in a pan). I’m wondering what the janky looking yellow liquid is at the bottom? I stayed up til 2am trying this recipe so I’m worried it was all for naught. I also took a picture of the seal which didnt seem broken/puffed up? I’ll just go to sleep and wait the 12 hr cooling step.
Accessibility: img 1 is cans with sauce and suspicious liquid, img 2 is recipe, img 3 and 4 are of seal
by Ok-Hippo7601
9 Comments
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The only other sub I did was using 5% vinegar instead of citric acid/lemon juice, but the Ball has a guide for interchanging them on the previous page
because you didn’t cook it down as much there’s too much excess water. additionally sometimes immersion blending can create the separation as well.
It’ll mix in when heating up, no worries. I’ve only ever had this happen when not using paste variety of tomatoes or mixing paste tomatoes with non paste variety.
Many *official* canned tomato recipes I’ve read mention to start heating a small amount of your tomatoes and when it starts boiling, to add the rest of the tomatoes cup by cup, keeping the temperature high.
This, they state, prevents separation.
I did just that this year (first time canning tomato sauce) and have not had any separation issues – but I am far from a pro so I don’t know if that’s the issue here?
It’s just water. Next time throw them in a pot after roasting and cook out a bit of the excess water prior to canning to avoid this.
My first batch of crushed tomatoes using the ball recipe exactly gave me jars that looked just like this (they taste great by the way, used some In chili this weekend). Next batch i cooked it down for an hour or so…about an inch in my pot, and they came out perfect.
It’s the juice separating out of the sauce, just needs to be mixed in when you come to use it.
I’ve put my tomatoes through a juicer to separate the pulp and juice and process them separately. The juice still separates as it still has some pulp in suspension but a good shake/stir hen I come to drink it and it’s fine.
This gave me two harvests from the tomatoes, both of which have a great tomato flavour and it also saved on gas from hot having to reduce all the juice in the pulp down (in fact I had to add some back to get it to the right consistency)
They’re not ugly and it was not all for naught. I’ve been doing it for years and still sometimes get the juice separation. It’s no big deal and may even out on its own in storage. And if it doesn’t, still no big deal. Congratulations on your first canning!