Pizza Sauce

This afternoon I canned a batch of pizza sauce using another recipe from my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. It was a pretty easy recipe, probably about an hour of prep time and an hour of cooking/canning time and not too labor intensive... the best kind of recipe in my opinion! :) It tastes pretty good from my taste test as I was filling the jars, too. I ended up with six and a half pints out of this, so quite a bit of sauce. We're looking forward to having homemade pizza this winter.

Pizza Sauce
(page 366 of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving)

13 cups fresh tomato puree (see note below)
1/2 cup bottled lemon juice
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder

Prepare the canner, jars and lids.

Place half of the tomato puree into a large stainless steel saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring occasionally. Maintaining a constant boil, add remaining tomato puree, 1 cup at a time. Stir in lemon juice, oregano, pepper, salt, and garlic powder. Boil hard, stirring frequently, until mixture is the consistency of a thin commercial sauce, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat.

Ladle hot sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace, if necessary. Wipe rim, center lid, screw band on to fingertip tight.

Place jars in canner, ensuring they are covered with water. Bring to a boil and process for 35 minutes. Remove canner lid. Wait 5 minutes and remove jars, cool, and store.

Notes:
You'll need about 9 lbs of plum tomatoes to make the tomato puree for this recipe.

To make a fresh tomato puree, pass quartered tomatoes through a food mill or Victorio strainer.

If you do not have a food mill, blanch, peel, core, seed and chop tomatoes. Place in a colander and let stand for 15 minutes. Discard liquid and puree tomatoes in a blender or food processor fitted with a metal blade.

Feel free to add more oregano, pepper and garlic powder, but do not change the proportion of tomato puree to lemon juice.

According to the NCHFP/USDA, you can add up to 3 cups of low acid veggies to 22 lbs. of tomatoes and still BWB safely. So - according to the Ball CBoHP, on the chart on page 427, one pound of Roma tomatoes equals 1 1/2 cups of crushed or pureed Romas. This recipe calls for 13 cups of puree - or 8.66 pounds. Based on the NCHFP/USDA guideline, which basically allows 1 cup low acid veggies per 7.3 pounds of tomatoes, you could safely add 1 cup + 2 Tbsp. of diced onion and garlic and still BWB this recipe. Just use a tiny amount of oil to saute' the veggies to keep it safe.

(I ended up with about 14 cups of puree, so I increased the lemon juice by the same percentage. I added 1 cup of finely chopped onion and 2 Tablespoons of finely chopped garlic.)

Recipe says it makes about 4 pints, but I ended up with 6 and a half pints.