No, it is never safe to thicken any tomato products including salsa before canning. It is also not safe to cook it down to make it thicker. The salsa must be thin in order to safely can it. The density is part of the safety of it, not just the acid level. You need to can the recipe as it is and then thicken with Clear jel or cornstarch, something like that AFTER you open it up. That or drain off some of the liquid after you open it up.

Sadly yes, I'm limited to water bath at this time. The plan was to buy a pressure canner and a dehydrator this summer but when my husband got laid off, those plans were canceled. In the past I've not had good luck making spaghetti sauce my kids would actually eat. The Chunky Basil one had such good reviews, I wanted to give it a shot. Since my freezers are full, I figured if I was going to practice, I wanted it to be a recipe I could can if it turned out well. I have a good sized garden (and since my parents own a greenhouse, they gave me the plants for free) as well as access to a local amish produce auction where stuff sells dirt cheap (a bushel of green bell peppers for chopping for $1.00, canning tomatoes for $4-6 a bushel, Onions for 20-25 cents a pound etc and my parents buy stuff there regularly and give me their extras in exchange for some of the stuff I can). I also have a good supply of lids I bought last year when stuff was clearanced out. Overall I'm not too worried if the Chunky Basil Sauce recipe doesn't taste as good as I hope. I can always use the extras up simply by dumping a jar in every time a make a batch of chili (my pot is 4 gallons so a quart can easily get lost in there), I just know I won't have $ to get regular wine anytime soon. And since I have virtually free supplies at hand to make it, I'm not out much besides my time if the cooking wine tastes funky. As long as I know the substitution is safe, I can use it up in one fashion or another. I just won't make more than 1 batch until we can test it out. Since we have spaghetti almost every Sunday since it's a supper quick meal to make after we get home for church, if I can find a suitable sauce, it will definitely help the wallet come this winter when I don't have access to so much produce. I got the salsa done today and if the kids behave well tomorrow I will be making the spaghetti sauce. I'll let you know how it turns out. Thanks again.

I buy it. I'd be stark raving mad if I was trying to first make tomato sauce and tomato paste and then make and can salsa. I usually buy organic paste and organic sauce at CostCo by the case. Sometimes I just buy it at Sam's Club in the huge cans sold to restaurants. It depends on how crazy life is at any given time, because the nearest Sam's is only about 30 or 40 miles away (depending on which one we go to) whereas the nearest CostCo is 80 miles away. Does it get expensive? Yes. However, we plan for it and budget for it, and what I normally do is stock up on paste and sauce over the winter months so that I'm not buying a lot in one summer month. Sometimes, when the tomato harvest is extra plentiful, I do find myself calling Tim at work in Dallas and asking him to stop at CostCo on the way home to pick up a case of sauce and 3 cases of paste. It's just a part of our summer---like higher utility bills. You have to remember that in the spring and summer, between fresh food from the garden and previously canned, frozen, dehydrated or root cellared food, we aren't buying much produce at all so the money that could be spent on produce is being spent on sauce and paste for salsa-making. Today we went grocery shopping at CostCo and Central Market and only bought two produce items: bell peppers for salsa-making and a watermelon because ours aren't ripe yet. And, as far as I am concerned, the money we're spending in summer for paste and sauce for the salsa making is Christmas money being spent in advance because we give away around 150 jars of salsa at Christmas (and the same amount of either pickles, candied jalapenos, jam or jelly so everyone gets 1 jar of salsa and 1 jar of something else), so when I'm putting together those gift bags of home-canned goods for everyone, guess what I'm not doing? I'm not at the store or the mall spending money for gifts because I spent that money and time back in the summer. If I'm smart and proactive, I'm also stocking up on vinegar, ReaLemon and ReaLime (you can specifically substitute ReaLemon and ReaLime for part or all of the vinegar in the Annie's Salsa recipe) in the spring when I'm doing my planting, and doing the same with canning salt, pepper, cumin and sugar. I like to have everything possible on hand when it is time to start making salsa because stopping to run to the store when there are no decent stores within a convenient driving distance chews up time that could be spent canning.

Kate, this is the first year I've done this pepper, so I did half sweet and half without sweetener. The unsweetened batch got garlic, black peppercorns, allspice berries and bay leaf. The sweet ones got pickling spice. I did run a darning needle through each one to be sure the pickling brine could enter the peppers. I learned that trick from Grandma when we canned spiced crabapples, she made me run a darning needle through from the stem to the blossom end so they wouldn't explode. That's odd about your leathery peppers. I canned a batch of "cowboy candy", which was basically a bread and butter pickle with peppers in place of cucumbers and they came out fine, not tough. No one really liked them, though, the people in the family who like the sweeter pickles don't like hot peppers and vice versa, so I haven't done that again. These are going to have to be darned good if they are a repeat because they are definitely tedious! Annie