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this site is so informative. I have learned as much about canning and cooking as I have chickens.
I was given three five pound cans of tomato sauce. I was going to re-can them into sizes that I could actually use, quarts or pints. I also have pumpkin paste... I figured I would re-pressure can that. As long as it is sterile to sterile, I should be fine right?
or... I could feed it to the chickens.
I need more can't can it rules, I went from thinking I would kill off my family to "It's been pressure canned, it's safe."
oh nuts, my spell checker disappeared. Now you know, I am lexicon intolerant.
Well, there is no such thing as sterile to sterile. As soon as you touch something with your hands, open it to the air, stick a spoon in it, etc it is no longer sterile. That's why there is no need to sterilize your jars and lids before use -- just heat them -- because as soon as you remove them from the sterilization bath they would no longer be sterile anyway. The "sterilization" of the food you cans happens in the canner when you're processing it, that's why we don't do inversion canning anymore, for instance.
So, now with that said, it still would be find as far as I know/am concerned to re-can some canned things but not okay for others. In the case of these two examples the tomato sauce would be fine, but I would not re-can pumpkin paste. The reason being: it's not recommended to home-can pumpkin of any kind. It's too dense. So, IOW, I would say it's fine to re-can anything that is safe to can to begin with, but would not try to re-can goods that are not safe for home canning to begin with.
Another thing to consider when re-canning is the texture -- I said it was okay to use canned tomato paste to can enchilada sauce or to re-can tomato sauce because texture isn't a concern with those goods. If you took a 10 lb can of green beans and re-canned those into pints on the other hand, you'd end up with mush. It would be safe, but the result would be yuck!
Could have been the mushy yuk factor was why i was tole not to recan salsa. Maybe i just assumed it was the unsafe factor. They told me to freese it instead.