***disclaimer before you think this is a real recipe, it is not! It is notes on what *I* did on a scientific basis in order to create my own safe bbq sauce recipe from tomato skins. It has not been tested by any official source and I completely created it myself instead of using my knowledge to safely tweak someone else’s. Use this recipe and this blog post at your own risk.**z
Once again I decided I’d re-try a recipe I had in the past and it’s been so long that I have no idea what that recipe even was or where it came from. I would hide in self-pitty but I’m too stubborn. I’ve been looking for days and I am just going to have to do my own digging on what makes a good and bottle-able sauce! So here goes:
First of all, I struggle with a lot of the recipes on the world wide web because they start with whole tomatoes! Since I use tomato skins to get my tomatoes, this is an impossible measurement. So for my recipe I started with 3 gallons of tomatoes and tomato skins that I have heated, blended, heated some more, and run through the victorio. It’s pretty tedious to run that much tomato through the victorio since it likes to just kinda hover and not run through with the entirety being soft and small, but some tips I re-learn every year should help the process: first, when things stop moving, do a turn or two backwards. It loosens everything back up and gets things flowing again. Also, if things get unproductive, grab a scoop/handful of the already processed skins and push them through. After that process, you’re left with smooth tomato juice, no seeds, no skins (or at least very small shreds of it. Not gonna lie, some seem to always slip in).
Then reduce that down by about half (so 3 gallons becomes 1 1/2). Upon further reading after it was too late, I wish I had added onion before reducing, because even the ball recipe adds diced onion, which is odd to me because I was told to never add vegetables. But I had onions and my guess is that they’d be obsolete as a pH-affecting entity in such a reducing process. I pH tested my tomatoes at this point just for scientific reasons and my particular tomatoes (I used all the interesting colored heirlooms, so a lot of Cherokee green and brandywine yellow and Valencia and German stripe. I also threw in all my unripe ones, about 3 pounds) simmered down this far had a pH of 4.3. just in case you were curious. I don’t know what they started out as before simmering down so this info is pretty worthless. But it gave me a starting off point for how much it’s safe to play with a BBQ recipe.
After it simmered down I added:
- 1 cup apple cider vinegar (5%)
- 1/2 cup honey
- 6 tbs molasses
- 5 tbs prepared mustard
- 3 tbs lemon juice
- 5 tbs salt
- 4 tbs onion powder (I think I was happier at 3)
- 3 tbs garlic powder
- 3 tbs chili powder ( I would have been happier at 2.5)
- 1 tbs sugar
- 4 tsp cinnamon (I wish I had stopped at 3)
- 4 tsp paprika
- 3 tsp nutmeg
- 2 tsp coriander
I let it summer about 30 minutes (I bet 15 minutes would work, I was testing flavors), put it in jars and pressure canned for 15 minutes. Only to discover that there aren’t any pressure canning guidelines! I’m guessing that pressure canning is just overkill? I intend to call the extension office tomorrow to find out if I need to reprocess them, but for now, they’re sealing easily as I type this [I called. Without hesitation they told me I was fine to have pressured it and probably overprocessed but for bbq sauce it wouldn’t matter]. And the pH is 3.97 so they’re acidic enough I easily could have waterbath canned them. It’s just I pressure canned the tomato sauce right before this and the sauce starts out the same way so I didn’t think about it until it was in the canner gaining pressure.
As far as flavor, I wish it were sweeter. My husband wishes it had more heat. But we could mess with it the whole time and end up ruining it in entirety, or bottle a decent sauce that is pretty basic and therefore can be tweaked for what preparation I intend. For instance, I will probably add some liquid smoke and a tablespoon of brown sugar when I use it to make pulled pork. But I will also probably add a dash of ketchup when I give it to my kiddos for dipping fries or chicken strips. And I’ll appease my husband and add some hot sauce and a little clear gelatin when I’m basting some ribs.
Also, I read during my research that you could add applesauce and the more we talked about it, the more Ranger and I agreed that would have helped it. Applesauce should fall safely I’m the pH range, too. We both think we might take one bottle and experiment with it that way.
