oops. forgot the salt canning

So i cooked down a lot of tomatoes into a soupy sauce. They're all various kinds of heirloom and organically grown tomatoes and i've heard they have a better acidity. We didn't add lemon juice in, but i'm not worried about that really.

We thought 9 oclock was an okay to start canning the tomatoes. We only had like...12 jars. For early risers, it was too late for us to remember to add salt to half of our jars. We have a pretty good idea of which ones they were, but the only way to be sure would be to open them, re-sanitize, and re can. I guess it's not too much work to redo, especially since we'll have to can more later probably.

Is no salt an issue, though? It just takes so long to sanitize and redo.

Johnmark Hatfield wrote:Is no salt an issue, though?

Nope. No problem at all with bottling. It's just a flavoring agent, not a preservative.

Salt is completely optional, just nice pre-flavoring.

Consider having a bit of citric acid on hand.  A small amount replaces the insipid lemon juice from the grocery store and increases the acidity without changing the flavor.

oh good!

I think i'm going to test some of the sauce with litmus to see if it goes below 4.6. We'll see.

I just read that you can make litmus paper by boiling anthocyanins from red cabbage.

I use a splash of balsamic vinegar in my tomato sauce, both for flavor and acidity.  I pH test with cheap litmus paper before canning and it always comes out around 4 without further intervention.