How thick do you want it? Of all those recipes, the Spaghetti Sauce without Meat is the only thick "sauce", the others are very thin since they aren't cooked down as much, more like chunks in juice (or juice).

If you want it thick enough to put on pasta (not stand-a-spoon-in-the-jar thick) then use the Spaghetti Sauce recipe and omit the peppers/celery. The mushrooms are optional anyway. And you can always omit or cut down on the garlic, the parsley, the sugar, the salt, the oil and change the oregano to your taste.

Yes, I do want a thick sauce rather than a thin juice. I guess what I liked about that recipe were the proportions or the ratio of tomatoes to onions. The spaghetti ratio is much less so I worry that I'm not going to get the onion flavor I am looking for.

I suppose I could use this one from Ball and just omit the basil and oil. It's not 18:3 like the Mexican sauce, but at 20:1, it's closer than the spaghetti.

I'm trying to make a canned base for pizza sauce without having to add fresh onions when I make the pizza sauce. (And yes, I canned the Ball Pizza Sauce recipe last year but it was bland, thin, and just tasted like plain tomato sauce so why bother.) I'm convinced it's the onions that give my regular pizza sauce its flavor.

Here is a link that might be useful: Ball Basil Garlic Tomato Sauce

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here. I know Dave would disagree, but I think you may be able to sub onions for peppers in the Spaghetti Sauce recipe. I know when NCHFP did their salsa acidification study they found that full pints of onions and full pints of peppers were both acidified to within 0.07 pH of each other with the same amount (60ml) of lemon juice and the same processing time (15 minutes).

"Full pint volumes of low acid vegetables (onions or peppers) were combined with ü cup of lemon juice (60 ml) to determine if consumer error could lead to unsafe acid levels in the guideline salsa recipe. Several varieties of onions were packed tight into a pint jar and weighed. From 263 - 295 g fit into jars from nine replicates. The maximum pint volume of green peppers weighed from 296 - 304 g for three replicates. After adding lemon juice, cooking, and boiling water processing, the full pint volumes of acidified onions had a pH range from 3.59 - 3.82 and full pint volumes of acidified green peppers had a pH range of 3.66 - 3.80 (data not shown). "

I see no reason why the same volume of onion substituted for green bell peppers in a tomato-based sauce and pressure canned would be any different. Especially since NCHFP says you can sub them in BWBing (Choice Salsa) and that you can sub sweet peppers for chiles and vice versa, when the acidification study showed that jalapenos were a bit harder to acidify than either onions or sweet peppers:

"Lemon juice (15 ml) safely acidified 100 g of each vegetable to below pH 4.0. Brine and solids pH measurements were nearly identical indicating acid equilibration within the 24 h period. When 30 ml of lemon juice was added to 100 g of vegetable the pH was safely reduced for: sweet green peppers (pH If you used the Spaghetti Sauce recipe and subbed onions for the peppers you would have 2C for 30 lbs of tomatoes. That's about twice as "tomatoey" as the juice blend, which says use no more than 3C of low acid (onions, peppers, or a mix) veggies to 22 lbs of tomatoes (or 4.09C low-acid veggies to 30 lbs of tomatoes). I would rather you use the processing time for the Spaghetti Sauce than the Juice Blend though, since you are cooking it down thicker.