Vegetable Recipe Challenge- Day 13-Crushed Tomatoes

More canning happening here! Once you get the process down and know what your doing canning is super easy, as well as fun.
 There’s many things you can do with tomatoes, and they aren’t as difficult to can as you may think. This recipe is for Crushed Tomatoes, in which all you really need to make sure you do is ad the correct amount of  citric acid into each jar. I added onions and peppers, but you can strictly use tomatoes.

Ingredients

Tomatoes
Bottled lemon juice or citric acid

Directions
  *Please note this is using a pressure canner. You cannot use the boiling water method for this recipe. You must have a weighted gauge pressure canner. *

Prepare pressure canner, your jars and lids. Core your tomatoes. Do not use any that are discolored (bruised) or damaged. Working in small batches to skin the tomatoes drop each tomato into boil water until the skin loosens and cracks. Remove to cold water and continued with other tomatoes. Peel skins off and discard the skins.
Place all the tomatoes into a  large stainless steel pan and bring to a boil. Mash the tomatoes using a potato masher. Keep on a gentle boil and keep string, you don’t want to burn the batch. Add all the other tomatoes and continue to mash and gently boil for about 5-10 minutes.

 Using prepared hot jars, add the right amount of citric/lemon juice.
Pint Jars using Lemon Juice- 1 tbsp,  Quart sized jars using Lemon Juice-  2 tbsp
Pint Jars using Critic acid- 1/4 tsp ,  Quart sized jars using Critic acid  1/2 tsp

Pack tomatoes into the jars leaving 1 inch head space. Remove all air bubbles adjust for head space either adding or removing more tomatoes/juice. Wipe the rim, place the top and screw band down until resistance is met. Place jars into your pressure canner and locking in the top you want to achieve lbs of pressure – Pint sized jars and quarts will be 15 minutes – * remember you must keep the 10lbs of pressure for a full 15 minutes. It will take up to 10-15 for this pressure to build up. The total time can be anywhere from 30-45 minutes of total time for one prepared batch.
Do NOT open, touch, or remove lid until all steam is let out of pressure canner. You may cause serious burns, injury if you do not wait for the canner to cool down. It must reach a pressure of “0” before you open it. I suggest simply walking away from it and leaving it alone. Mine takes anywhere from 2 hours to 6 hours to cool down considering how high the pressure was. Read your Pressure canner manual carefully!!