The first lid pinged at 2:40 on Saturday afternoon. Debbie stopped in the middle of a sentence, held up one finger, and counted the next six out loud as they sealed. Then she went right back to telling me I was coring the tomatoes wrong. She was right.
That was the first of three canner loads. By 6 o'clock, Debbie, Tyler and I had turned two bushels of tomatoes into 21 quart jars in her kitchen in Kirksville. I've eaten Debbie's canned tomatoes every winter since Tyler and I got married, but this was the first year I helped, and the first year I finally asked the question I always wonder about. Does canning actually save money?
The day
We left Macon at 7:15 in my CR-V for the 35-minute drive north. The tomatoes came from a produce stand outside Kirksville that sells canning seconds by the bushel. Those are tomatoes with a crack or a soft spot that won't sell as slicers, and they were $25 a bushel. A bushel is about 53 pounds, so we carried roughly 106 pounds of tomatoes into Debbie's kitchen.
Debbie has done this for close to forty years, and she has a system. Wash, score an X in the bottom, dunk in boiling water, then ice water, slip off the skins, cut out the cores and bad spots. Her water-bath canner holds seven quarts. We did two loads of crushed tomatoes, with bottled lemon juice in each jar, then cooked the rest down into a thick sauce with onion and garlic for the third load.
Not all 106 pounds made it into jars. Some went to trimming, some went on sandwiches at lunch, and Debbie kept a bowl back for slicing. Sauce also cooks down a lot. Those seven quarts of sauce took around 35 pounds of tomatoes.
The honest cost per jar
| What | Cost |
|---|---|
| Two bushels of canning tomatoes | $50.00 |
| Lids, two boxes of 12 | $7.94 |
| Bottled lemon juice, two bottles | $5.36 |
| Onions, garlic and spices for the sauce | $6.20 |
| Gas, Macon to Kirksville and back | $7.30 |
| Total | $76.80 |
$76.80 divided by 21 jars is $3.66 a jar.
A few things aren't in there. Debbie already had the jars, and she wouldn't take a dime for the stove or the canner. New quart jars run about $15 a dozen, but they last for years, so I left them out. I also didn't count our time, which was three adults for about nine hours.
Compared with the store
A 28-ounce can of store-brand crushed tomatoes is $1.58 at the Walmart in town. A quart is 32 ounces, so that's about $1.81 for a quart's worth. A 24-ounce jar of store-brand spaghetti sauce is $1.68, which works out to $2.24 a quart.
So our 14 quarts of crushed tomatoes and 7 quarts of sauce would cost about $41 at the store. We spent $76.80. Canning cost us around $36 more than buying, or about $1.70 more per jar.
The tomatoes are the whole story. They were $50 of the $76.80, about 65%. If the tomatoes were free, our cost would drop to $26.80, or $1.28 a jar, and canning would beat the store easily. That's how Debbie's math always worked. For most of her life the tomatoes came out of her own garden. Our porch buckets did fine this summer for BLTs and salsa, but a few buckets were never going to grow 106 pounds.
Why we'll do it again anyway
We brought home the 14 jars of crushed tomatoes and Debbie kept the 7 of sauce, which is more than fair rent for her kitchen, her canner and forty years of knowing how. Our jars are lined up on the top shelf of the pantry, and they're going into chili and soup all winter. They taste better than anything in a can, and I know exactly what's in them.
And honestly, I got a whole Saturday with Tyler's mom, learning something she's done since before Tyler was born. That part doesn't fit in a table.
Next year I'm going to ask the produce stand about end-of-season prices, when the seconds should be cheaper, and Tyler wants to add two more tomato buckets on the porch. Debbie has already told us which kind to plant, and I've stopped arguing with her about tomatoes.
