There are so many questions popping up in the minds of many beginners when they read the instruction on canning tomatoes. Unfortunately, those who post and wrote the recipes of canning tomatoes seldom provide them with the answers. The writers simply explain about the step by step activity in order to be able to produce the best canning tomatoes. And although the beginners already do the steps that are asked of them, but many times they do not get the results that they are hoping for. In order to help them with these issues, here is a list of the most frequently asked questions and the possible solution or explanations.
Why do some tomatoes separate from the liquid in the can?
The separation between tomato and the liquid is one of the most often issue occurring in canning tomatoes; however, there are different scenario that will cause this problem.
- Scenario 1
In scenario 1, you will have the water on the top of the solid tomatoes that lay at the bottom. Many beginners will ask if this is normal. And the answer is actually, a scenario like this is pretty normal. This situation will only tell you one thing that is that the juice is made before the heating. It can be that the tomatoes were chopped and the put in the steamer and processed while they are still raw and this happens before the heating.
To solve this issue, you can cut the tomatoes in large chunks or maybe even leave them whole. The heating should also be done before the cutting in order to minimize the possible separation.
- Scenario 2
In this scenario, you will find the liquid at the bottom while the solids is at the top or the reverse situation of scenario 1. The cause of this problem is too much preheating or the preheating is more than 5 minutes. Because of this, the pectin breaks down. If you want to open the can, you need to shake the jar first so that the solids and water will mix.
Why do the liquid disappear when the tomato jars were removed from the canner?
Some beginners will be surprised to see that half of their jar content has disappeared. There are different causes to this situation, they are:
- The tomatoes were not heated before filling.
- The tomatoes were packed too loosely or too tightly in the jars
- The air bubbles were still inside of the can before the sealing
- The water was not covering the jar
- The water was overfilling the jar
- etc
