Canning Homemade Marinara Sauce

To Skin Your Tomatoes

Skinning tomatoes is actually really easy. You simply cut an x in the bottom and drop them in boiling water for a minute. Pull them out and drop them in an ice bath aka your kitchen sink full of cold water and ice. The skins will peel right off. Seriously. They say not to use garden tomatoes for marinara but I did, and guess what, it turned out just fine. I picked out as much seeds as I could but most chunky marinara does have some seeds in it.

Load Up Your Stock Pot

Ingredients:

• 20 tomatoes
• 2 onions
• 4 bell peppers
• 1 can tomato paste
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup salt
• 1/3 cup sugar
• Garlic
• Oregano
• Basil
• Red pepper flakes
• 2 bay leaves

Add all your ingredients to a large stock pot and simmer for about 2 hours until your sauce starts to cook down. I like my pasta sauce sweet so I add the extra sugar but if you don’t like a sweet sauce just omit this ingredient. I also never measure seasonings so just add and taste and add more if you think it needs it.

Don’t forget to remove the bay leaves once your pasta sauce cooks down. I then added my sauce to a blender and just pulsed until it was the consistency I wanted. I don’t like tomato chunks in mine but I still wanted a thicker consistency.

To Can Your Marinara Sauce

If you’re looking to make your marinara sauce shelf stable, you can do so by pressure canning. I use a NESCO digital pressure canner to preserve my food. I simply hot packed my quarts jars with the sauce using a funnel. I then wiped the rims with a damn paper towel, topped with lids and screwed on my rings fingertip tight.

I also add 2 tbsp lemon juice to each quart. Pressure can quarts for 25 minutes. Let them cool for an hour when the pressure canner shuts off. Then it is safe to open the canner and let the jars cool for 25 hours on a towel. Store them in your pantry worry free!