When blending whole tomatoes and then cooking to put up as tomato sauce, is it necessary to water bath the hot, jarred sauce or will the jars seal?
I've heard Trish and Dave refer to putting up tomato sauce, but I haven't done that before and sure would appreciate step-by-step instructions.
Thank all of you experienced gardeners for your expertise.

Ann

Tomatoes need to be either water bathed or pressure canned, depending on what else is in with them. As a general rule of thumb, you should process your jars per the least acidic vegetable or use a USDA approved recipe which has been tested for safety. When I used to process tomato sauce, I would pressure can the jars because I also added onions, peppers, and celery to the sauce. This may have been over-cautious, but I usually took a better safe than sorry approach. There has also been some concern about the safety of water bathing low-acid tomatoes - I'd do a web search to see what the latest thought is on that (my go-to Ball Blue Book for Canning/Freezing is from 1986 and woefully out of date).

I still use the old Ball Blue Book, but also check for current information on the Ball site.
Here is a basic tomato sauce from Ball:
http://www.freshpreserving.com...

There have been many improvements in pressure canners and you can put up so many more things using that method it might be worth the investment if you have a large garden.

You can also use your pressure canner as a water bath canner by leaving off the seal and pressure gauge. I find it easier to use than a thin speckled water bath canner because it is so much heavier (holds the heat better) and taller (which prevents that annoying boil over). I also find that a dash of alum in the heating water will keep mineral deposits from discoloring the metal (my water is from a well).

@Trish always finishes them in a hot water bath. She may come along and post additional info.

Thank you all so much for your input.
My husband and I have much to learn about this.

Ann

I learned a lot by participating in the Master Food Preserver program at my local County extension office (years and years ago). It was free and the only commitment was to contribute something like 10-20 hours of community service (i forget exactly). I easily satisfied this by managing the Food Preservation section of our weekend long community fair, which was fun to do and I met a lot of fellow canners.