Although I ate a lot of jam, this is where things started for me.  My Parents (one is Acadian and the other line is Scottish Celt ancestry) have little tomato canning in their family histories.  Both families have been in Canada for 100s of years and neither placed a premium on canning tomato sauce.  Through a love of food and exposure to friends, tomato sauce became a fall tradition in our house – one I avoided for most of my life.

My Parents did things I`m not sure I would have had the patience for – long batches of tomatoes ground by hand on the back of a pickup truck is one such example.  My Father also MacGyvered a hand-crank tomato press to attach it to a furnace motor to make a machine operated tomato press.

W e (my parents, Dana and I) are now spoiled with equipment.  We can 8+ bushels in a day (with 4 people working) which means we get 110-130 large jars of sauce.  We`ve amassed equipment over the years to spread the investment though we figure the total cost of equipment is about $900 (this could easily be split between 2 or 3 sets of families if you are comfortable sharing, as we do).  The fact that we now fill our shelves with tomato sauce for about $1 a jar (and have for more than 5 years with the equipment) also lowers the overall price considerably.

There are extensive posts that we`ve shared here before on tomato sauce – rather than regurgitating, we`ll share some links to the process.  Here`s a few random thoughts that haven`t been touched on in those articles:

• Heirloom tomatoes.  Be very, very cautious using these for sauce.  Some are simply not acidic enough and your sauce will spoil.
• Adding acid.  such as lemon juice or acidic acid will increase the acidity of a sauce and reduce risk of spoilage.  I know people who do it both ways and can only recommend you make the most informed decision that you are comfortable with by knowing the risks, advantages and disadvantages of adding acid (or not).  The ultimate guideline (in my opinion) is (once again) the National Center for Home Food Preservation who has an entire section on preserving  tomatoes.  Their recommendation is to add acid.  We do not add acid and have been successful though a good friend (who has made sauce for more than 30 years) lost an entire batch to low acidity a few years ago (in his case this meant 200 jars and no sauce in winter).

As for making sauce, here’s some of our ‘best-of’:

• An overview of preserving sauce
• Start by picking your tomatoes
• Crush your friends
• Cook it down to can it.
• Herb it, jar it, seal it.
• Enjoy your results.
• And this years experiment: don`t forget to leaf it

We’ll cover some ideas on ketchup tomorrow (something we haven’t done yet) and why I’m so excited for it.

This is part of our Preserving Summer series (click the link for access to all of the articles to date)  that supports our recent article in Edible Toronto.  We welcome any and all questions, comments and your ideas!