Chicken broth is not usually clear, but cloudy. A soup can get colors from any added vegetables. You have not mentioned what veggies you canned with it. Chicken soup with added carrots will give off a little color. Tomatoes and spagetti sauces need no pressure canning if they are made from recipes meant for BWB. The use of small amounts of low acid onions and peppers, or even using dried can help. You should also add a half teaspoon of citric acid to each jar of tomatoes when doing a BWB.

trh, what else was in the chicken soup? I canned a batch of corn one year that turned a rusty color, the extension service said it was because the corn was too mature and it was an enzymatic reaction. I've had garlic turn rusty too, and blue once.

So, it might be an ingredient in the soup that's causing discoloration and the soup would still be just fine.

So the spaghetti sauce tasted burned, or just looked like it was brown or off color? Sometimes the herbs and spices in sauce can also cause a color difference.

Annie

Corn can oxidize, I had that occur with corn relish I made. Blue garlic tinge is pretty. It will disappear after a while. I just dug up all my Music Garlic. Huge bulbs with big cloves of one layer. These are hard neck and the scapes were cut off about a month ago, and pickled. All the garlic is now in my greenhouse on a big screen with a fan blwoing underneath. Should be ready to store in a few weeks. Its the best strain I have ever grown, and have already placed an order for next years crop. It is planted in about Septemmber.

Sorry - didn't give you the details I should have.
In the chicken soup there were carrots, celery and cabbage. I bet the carrots gave off some color.
In the spaghetti sauce there was meat so I had to PC it. It did have a burned taste along with the color. I used a packaged spaghetti mix (I think Mrs. Wages) and added cooked burger to it. I can't remember how long I PC'd it but went by the requirements for the meat since that was the riskiest ingredient.

Blue garlic is pretty common. I get it all of the time. It is a result from immature garlic or garlic that is not fully dry, from copper pans, or from a high amount of copper in the water. Garlic contains anthocyanin, a water-soluble pigment that under acid conditions may turn blue or purple. Except for blue-green color resulting from an abnormally high copper-sulfate concentration, such color changes do not indicate the presence of harmful substances.

I have had this happen if I let the pressure get too high. Chicken soup (that had only green veggies) took on a brownish/reddish hue and tasted a bit burnt. Chili was already red (duh) and had a burnt aftertaste. Both time I attributed to the presure creeping up in the 13-14lb range.

Yes, the spagetti sauce may have been PC with too high a temperature. If most of the water was boiled out side the canner, thats a good indication of too much heat on the burner. Yes, carrots will leave color. Try making dilly beans with purple stringbeans. Wild, they turn green, but the jars have purple sediment at the bottom.

Ken, I made dilly beans with those purple beans and you are right, they start with kind of a pretty pinkish tinge to the brine, which settles into a lovely lavender sediment. The taste is still the same, but the first time I saw that I kind of blinked.

The spaghetti sauce, I think, was overcooked if it had a scorched flavor. Because meat has to be processed so long, I usually canned tomato sauce without the meat, then just browned the burger and added the sauce to it when serving. It's not as convenient and I sure could have used the freezer space the ground beef took up, but it just wasn't as good if I canned it with the meat in it. Plus, the ground beef had a soft/overcooked texture that no one liked, so I couldn't overcome all the issues. It's all canned without the meat now.

Annie