Oh, patty, just saw your question above. I *knew* I was opening a can (or jar?) of worms there. Yes, you can use peppers or celery or a mix b/c this recipe says so. I said I was going out on a limb and Dave probably wouldn't agree, but gave my rationale. Now, I know the salsa study was an acidification study, but since the spaghetti sauce is a PC recipe too I thought onions instead of peppers was safe but when you get into pickling, you really have to be careful. Just b/c a salsa study and a salsa recipe (Choice Salsa, I think Annie's too) say peppers and onions are basically equivalent (the acid in the recipes is sufficient to acidify either/both), and a PC recipe says you can sub celery for peppers, does NOT equate to peppers=onions=celery in all recipes, either PC or BWB. I'm not a food scientist, but peppers and onions have pretty close to the same pH to begin with. Onions might have more water activity, but the acid in the salsa recipes is enough to allow the substitution, AND it was specifically measured in that study. The pH of celery is just that little bit higher than peppers OR onions, and it's more fibrous than peppers but also seems to have more free water so unless a pickling recipe says you can sub celery for peppers, I'd not assume it was safe. I made a mixed vegetable pickle last month based on the JoP recipe but only after I emailed Linda Z and asked if there had to be a certain proportion of green tomatoes, etc. since I had mostly squash and beans, no cabbage. She said go ahead, feel free to create my own mix, but that's a straight vinegar pickle, the recipe (Picalilli) says you can change up proportions, and I double-checked with her. Oh, and it still didn't look like enough brine (density issue) so I added another cup of vinegar for a total of 3.5C of vinegar for 13.5C of veggies as compared to 3.25C of vinegar for 13.5C of veggies in the NCHFP recipe (actually they use 4.5C vinegar for 18.75C veggies). This post was edited by ajsmama on Mon, Sep 15, 14 at 12:55

"But actually it isn't all that difficult to know the approved ones as there are so few of them for spaghetti sauce since it is a low acid product. NCHFP/USDA publications, which includes the ones in So Easy to Preserve, and those in the Ball/Bernardin books. That's it. There aren't any in Small Batch Preserving." Well, it may not call itself spaghetti sauce, but there is "Chunky Basil Pasta Sauce" with fresh herbs and veges in Small Batch Preserving, and also "Roasted Vegetable Pasta Sauce" with both veges and fresh herbs in Small Batch Preserving, and also "Seasoned Tomato Sauce" with veges and fresh herbs that Small Batch Preserving suggests using in "pasta sauces, soups, stews, pizza, or casseroles." So, although the OP did leave the door open to reasonable questions about recipe safety, it is also good to take care in making broad statements about recipes which include such phrases as "there are no recipes which. . .", or "all approved recipes for (pasta sauce, salsa, whatever) MUST be. . ." since there may well be a safe recipe which allows such processing. For example: you CAN use fresh herbs in the approved NCHFP spaghetti sauce recipe, as this email from Elizabeth Andress states: Thank you for visiting the National Center for Home Food Preservation. > question -> Spaghetti Sauce without Meat: > 1. Can I eliminate the celery/peppers completely? > 2. Can I use fresh herbs or only dried? > 3. Can I add basil (fresh or dried)? > 4. Can I eliminate the sugar? For our particular procedures: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_03/spaghetti_sauce.html You can leave out the celery and peppers completely, leaving everything else the same. (The mushrooms are already optional, also.) If you use fresh herbs, make sure they are very clean. I can only recommend using the equivalent volume measures, though, and that may not give you the flavor you desire. Eg., instead of 2 TBSP dried oregano, use 2 TBSP minced fresh oregano. I do not have enough information to know the upper limit on how much fresh to add, so that's all I can suggest without testing. (which we cannot do). You can use basil as a substitute for one of the other herbs (eg, you may not want the parsley with basil). Or, if you are leaving out the celery and peppers completely, you could add 2 to 4 TBSP of basil. Yes, you can eliminate the sugar in this recipe. The chopped celery and/or peppers and the sugar add a little moisture/liquid in many recipes. In this particular sauce, however, it is cooked down to thickened consistency anyway, so the amount of liquid that would be added by these ingredients would not be important as it might be in other types of food products/mixtures. Best wishes, Elizabeth Andress -------------------------------------- Elizabeth L. Andress, Ph.D. Project Director, National Center for HFP Professor and Extension Food Safety Specialist Department of Foods and Nutrition The University of Georgia 208 Hoke Smith Annex Athens, GA 30602-4356 Phone: (706) 542-3773 FAX: (706) 542-1979 -----------------------------------------------

Plan for making spaghetti sauce. Procrastinate until every square inch of counter space is filled. At the first fruit fly in the kitchen, go back out to the garden and get every tomato that is even close to ripe (of course this means two or three days of tomato withdrawl after sauce day). Blanch tomatoes, slip off the peels, cut in half and squeeze out seeds. Throw in blender and puree. Dump in the largest pot known to man and boil down for an hour or three. Reserve about one sixth of the tomatoes to be sliced/crushed and added for the last half hour at which time you will also add seasoning--for me onions sauteed in olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano & sweet basil. If there's any left after feeding your four (and soon to be five) kids, freeze in large ziplock freezer bags. That is all. Oh, italian sausage or homemade meatballs are nice, but I wouldn't add these to the portion I'm freezing. You can call this Dude Rubble's 18 variety spaghetti sauce scramble

I have canned tomatoes, but not tomato/spaghetti sauce. This past weekend, I picked a mess of tomatoes from the garden and decided to make tomato sauce for the freezer. I looked online and found lots of recipes/methods, but took the easy way out. I cored and quartered the tomatoes and cut out any bad spots, but I neither seeded nor skinned them. I just put them in the blender in batches, along with a couple of onions and some garlic, a bit of salt, some bell peppers and fresh basil. I could have added a lot of other things to make it more of a spaghetti sauce, but chose not to, because I might want to use the sauce for something that I didn't want to necessarily taste like marinara. Just cooked it for about 8 hours until it was the thickness I desired (less than half the volume before cooking), let it cool, and put it in freezer bags and plopped it in the freezer. That is, all except for enough for DH to make spaghetti the following day. And of course, he added lots of other "stuff" - he always does, which is why it wasn't necessary to put everything in the sauce. And I know that many would cringe at having skins and seeds in the sauce, but I ate the spaghetti last night and it was delicious. Not bitter at all. Just yummy. DH was impressed and said he thinks he's been ruined for store-bought sauce.