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Spaghetti Sauce Cover
36 Quarts of canned spaghetti sauce ready to be labeled

The garden is in full bloom. Wednesday night, we went out and picked roughly 90 pounds of tomatoes.  We have about 8 plants, each of a different variety. 

Tomato plants in the garden
Tomato plants in the garden

We have used tomatoes to make large batches of salsa, tomato soup and even ketchup before, but we wanted to try something new, so we decided to make up a batch of spaghetti sauce. I found a recipe that looked fairly simple and went for it:

Instant Pot Quick and Easy Spaghetti Sauce

We used three Instant pots to make the process move faster. We ended up using about 60 pounds of tomatoes which created 36 quarts of sauce. This took about 24-man hours. We accomplished that by running 4 batched through the two 6qt Instant pots (8 total) and 3 batched through the 8qt Instant pot.

Instant Pots lined up
Instant Pots

Here is a break down of what we did:

  1. Sautéed oil, garlic & onions
  2. Added chopped carrots, celery, tomatoes, and spices
  3. After they had cooked a few minutes, pressure cook about half an hour
  4. Using an immersion blender, puree contents of pot
  5. Mix contents of all Instant pots together and simmer for several hours in large pot to thicken
  6. Pressure can in quart jars on the back porch
Washed tomatoes ready to be chopped  ~  Chopped Onions  ~  Chopped carrots & celery
Washed tomatoes ready to be chopped ~ Chopped Onions ~ Chopped carrots & celery

We had to simmer and thicken our sauce because we used a variety of tomato breeds. If we would have just used Roma tomatoes (lower water content), we could have limited the time for reduction.

Simmering pot and canner
Simmering pot on left, canner on right

Tonight, we will make spaghetti with our new sauce, ground meat off the farm and try it out!

PS: For more info on the basics of canning check out an earlier blog