North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com>]

On Monday, January 5, 2004, at 11:43 AM, HDessureault wrote:

> Back to my personal experience with this quick sealing method, it works very
> well if you keep your jars under close supervision.
> I was under a very tight schedule last Fall to make a lot of tomato sauce
> before going on a trip and I used this method to process the large quantity
> of jars and because I feel confident about my skills at canning. About a
> month later when I came back, I had to move a couple of jars to the fridge,
> whose lids were starting to slightly push up, which does not mean that it
> did not still tasted fine, since it does not take very much to create
> pressure in the jar. Tomato sauce is acidic and very safe and some jars
> keeping only a month instead of a year is fine by me. 

Not all varieties of tomatoes are equally acidic; some may not be acidic enough for this to be a safe technique. And you can't taste or smell botulism toxin.

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly