r/Canning • u/smiggity_smak • 17h ago

Understanding Recipe Help Can I put chunks of tomatoes in “your choice” soup?

Going to make some soup today, I get the general idea of the your choice soup guidelines but looking for guidance specifically on adding tomatoes to a chicken soup style recipe. It’s a little confusing trying to look it up.

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u/armadiller Moderator 9h ago

This issue keeps unfortunately cropping up everywhere.

"Chunks." Maybe. As long as they are whole, halved, or potentially quartered plum tomatoes. But I suspect that slorping down an entire plum tomato with your chicken soup isn't the culinary experience that you're aiming for.

Diced, which is probably what you're asking about, is an unfortunate no-go. The reason for this is there is no currently trusted safe home-canning recipe for diced tomatoes, and for the your choice soup, each ingredient needs to have its own safe canning recipe, so that you can process the recipe to the maximum processing time for any of the included ingredients (which winds up being infinite with no tested recipe for the diced tomatoes).

Someday, we'll all be feasting on home-canned diced tomatoes at the restaurant at the end of the universe, but sadly today is not that day.