Tomato Canning Recipes | Creative Canning
Fill the pantry with sauce, juice, and jars you’ll cook from all winter
Tomato season is the one that takes over the whole kitchen. Just about everything else I put up arrives in batches I can work around, but tomatoes come in flats and five-gallon buckets. Mid-August is when many gardeners stop pretending they’re going to cook anything that isn’t a tomato.
For most of the country, this is peak. Tomatoes run from June through October, but late July into September is when they come in faster than anyone can eat them, and it’s when farm stands start selling seconds by the box for next to nothing. If you’ve been waiting for the right week to buy in bulk, this is it. Bruised and split tomatoes are perfectly good for sauce, and they’re often half the price of the pretty ones.
The nice thing about tomatoes is that almost everything you make from them is water bath canning. No pressure canner required for sauce, juice, whole tomatoes, or marinara, as long as you add acid. That makes this one of the best crops for anyone still building confidence with canning.
I’ve put together a list of more than fifty Tomato Canning Recipes to keep your pantry stocked, with everything from plain tomatoes to salsa, sauce, relish, soup, and even jam.
Below are the recipes I come back to every August, organized by what you actually want to end up with on the shelf.
Start Here: Plain Tomatoes
If you only put up one thing this year, make it plain tomatoes. They’re the most flexible jar in the pantry, and they turn into whatever you need in February.
Two things worth reading before you start. Acidifying Tomatoes for Home Canning covers why modern varieties need added lemon juice or citric acid, and Best Tomatoes for Canning explains why the paste types that make gorgeous sauce turn out disappointing when canned whole.
Sauces for Pasta Night
This is where most of my tomatoes end up. A shelf of pasta sauce means dinner on the nights when nobody has the energy to make dinner.
Canning Spaghetti Sauce with Meat (pressure canning)
There are more in my 30+ Pasta Sauce Recipes For Canning list, including vodka sauce and a few regional variations.
Tomato Soups
Canned tomato soup is one of those pantry items that feels like cheating. Open a jar, heat it, and you’ve made lunch.
If you want more options, my 6+ Tomato Soup Recipes for Canning page has the rest.
Cherry Tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes get treated like a snack crop, but a few plants will bury you. They can be preserved just like regular tomatoes, and they’re worth it.
The whole set lives on my 12+ Cherry Tomato Canning Recipes page.
A Few Worth Trying Once
I’ve kept salsa out of this one on purpose. There’s so much of it that it needs its own letter, and that’s coming next week. If you can’t wait, the 60+ Salsa Canning Recipes list is already up.
Before You Start
Almost everything above is safe for water bath canning, with the exception of spaghetti sauce with meat, which has to be pressure canned. The one rule you can’t skip is adding acid to every jar of tomatoes, whether that’s bottled lemon juice, citric acid, or vinegar. Tomatoes sit right at the edge of the safe pH range, and modern varieties have been bred sweeter than the ones our grandmothers canned. The acid is what keeps them on the water bath side of the line.
If you’re new to all of this, Waterbath Canning for Beginners walks through the whole process, and tomatoes are honestly a great place to start.
What are you doing with your tomatoes this year? If there’s a recipe you’re hunting for and you don’t see it here, tell me, and I’ll dig it up.
If you’d rather write to me directly, please use ashley@creativecanning.com rather than hitting reply. (Substack replies almost always land in my spam folder, and I hate missing them.)
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Happy Canning!
-Ashley at Creative Canning
I love your site! All your recipes are so useful. Especially the per-quart/per-pint figures. I use an electric pressure canner that only holds 5 quarts/7pints at a time, so that’s super handy. Thank you for all you do for the canning community!
these look so yummy thank you. I will save this email and refer to the recipes as needed.