First Canning Fail

Peach salsa from Food in Jars

Last night I ruined a batch of peach salsa with a really dumb mistake: I read ONE line from a recipe on the wrong page and added two tablespoons of salt to the pot of salsa. After I did that, I looked back to see what the next ingredient was going to be, and realized it didn't call for ANY salt. I had read off the Zucchini and Pepper Relish page by accident. It was definitely too late to do anything about it, so I heaped the salsa into jars and boiled them for ten minutes. I was hoping that two tablespoons of salt could be swallowed up by four pounds of peaches. But it couldn't.

I tasted a little while it was still warm and it was too salty. Still, I was holding out hope that after it cooled, the saltiness would mellow out. I tried it tonight; it didn't.

Even though I'm going to have to throw away 4 1/2 pints of otherwise perfect peach salsa, I've decided I can't let it bother me too much because after almost two years of canning, this is the first real canning fail (baking fails are another story). And I got a really good deal on the peaches at Grocery Outlet.

I'll just be double, triple, and quadruple checking every ingredient against the recipe for every batch of anything I make from now on. That should be fun.