• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Healthy Canning
  • Home
  • Recipes
    • Recipes by category
    • Recipe Index
    • Drying food
    • Other online sources
  • Equipment
    • General Equipment
    • Pressure Canning
    • Steam Canning
    • Water bath canning
    • Food Dehydrators
  • Learning
    • Learn home canning
    • Home Canning Safety Topics
    • Unsafe home canning practices
    • Home canning concepts
    • Ingredients for home canning
    • Issues in home canning
    • Learning resources
  • Contact
    • Sitemap
    • About
    • FAQ
    • Write to us
    • Media
    • Copyright
    • Privacy
    • Terms of Use
menu icon
go to homepage
search icon
Homepage link
  • Recipes
  • Equipment
  • Learning
×

Home / Tomatoes / Creole sauce

Creole sauce

Filed Under: Seasonal Summer, Tomatoes Tagged With: Creole, Sauces, Tomatoes

Jump to Recipe Print Recipe

creole-sauce-pn

Creole Sauce is a slightly chunky, slightly spicy seasoned thick tomato sauce. In New Orleans, it’s sometimes referred to as “red gravy.”

You could use it over shrimp, fried eggplant, or grilled or baked chicken breasts.

The Ball / Bernardin Complete book, from which this recipe comes, suggests: “This spicy Southern sauce is ideal for baking and barbequing chicken or fish. If it’s too hot for your taste, tame it with a bit of sour cream or yogurt, which will give a slightly charred result to your meat or fish, similar to blackened chicken.”

Here’s a slightly different version, from the Ball Blue Book: Creole Sauce for Pressure Canning.

Contents hide
  • 1 The recipe
  • 2 Creole sauce
    • 2.1 Ingredients
    • 2.2 Instructions
  • 3 Reference information
  • 4 Recipe notes
  • 5 Recipe source
  • 6 History
  • 7 Nutrition information
    • 7.1 Regular version
    • 7.2 Sugar-free version

The recipe

Jar size choices: 125 ml (½ cup / 4 oz)  OR quarter-litre (½ US pint / 8 oz)

Processing method: Either water-bath or steam canning

Yield: 8 quarter-litre (half-pint / 250 ml / 8 oz / 1 cup) jars

Headspace: 2 cm (½ inch)

Processing time: Either size jar 20 minutes

3.67 from 3 votes
Print

Creole sauce

Yield: 8 x quarter-litre jars (half-pint / 250 ml / 8 oz / 1 cup)

Course Main Course
Cuisine American
Keyword Sauce
Prep Time 30 minutes
Cook Time 1 hour
Total Time 1 hour 30 minutes
Yield 8 quarter-litre jars (half-pint / 250 ml / 8 oz / 1 cup)
Calories 11 kcal

Ingredients

  • 3 kg tomatoes (11 cups / 6.5 lbs. Measured after prep)
  • 150 g green pepper (finely chopped. 1 cup / 5 oz. Measured after prep. About 1 large.)
  • 175 g onion (finely chopped .1 cup / 6 oz in weight. Measured after prep.)
  • 3 cloves garlic (washed, peeled, minced)
  • 4 tablespoons red wine vinegar (5% or higher)
  • 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tablespoon oregano dried
  • 2 teaspoons hot pepper sauce
  • 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • ½ teaspoon salt (or non-bitter, non-clouding salt sub)
  • ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
Metric - US Customary

Instructions

  1. Wash, peel, core and coarsely chop the tomato.
  2. Add to a large pot (at least 8 litres / quarts in size).
  3. Wash, seed, and chop the green pepper. Add to pot.
  4. Wash, peel and chop the onion. Add to pot.
  5. Wash, peel and mince the garlic. Add to pot.
  6. Add all remaining ingredients to pot.
  7. Bring to a boil, stirring often.
  8. Reduce heat to a gentle boil, and let simmer uncovered for about 40 minutes, or until the consistency of a somewhat thin ketchup.
  9. Ladle sauce into heated jars, leaving 2 cm (½ inch) headspace.
  10. Debubble, adjust headspace.
  11. Wipe jar rims.
  12. Put lids on.
  13. Process in a water bath or steam canner.
  14. Process jars for 20 minutes; increase time as needed for your altitude.

Reference information

How to water bath process.

How to steam can.

When water-bath canning or steam canning, you must adjust the processing time for your altitude.

For salt substitute, non-bitter, non-clouding Herbamare Sodium-Free was used.

 

Recipe notes

  • You could start with 2 ¾ litres (11 cups / 88 oz) of crushed or diced tomato from a tin or home canned.
  • To coarsely chop the tomato, you can use the pulse button on the food processor.
  • To finely chop the green pepper and the onion, you can use the pulse button on a food processor.
  • The recipe actually calls for green onion, presumably with its stalks for the taste, though it doesn’t actually say. Any onion would do but if you do have green onion, you might want to use it.
  • Any vinegar is fine as long as it is 5% strength or higher.
  • If you prefer a sauce with more ‘heat’, add a bit more cayenne pepper.
  • This is an ideal mixture to use a heat diffuser with during the long simmering phase to avoid bottom scorching.

Purists would dispute that this is a true Creole sauce, as it is missing celery. In Creole cooking, green pepper, onion and celery are known as the “Holy Trinity.”

You can’t just add celery, as you aren’t supposed to increase the amount of low-acid ingredients in a recipe like this that clearly depends on a pH lower than 4.6 for safety. You could safely add a teaspoon of celery salt to try to compensate for the lost flavour.

For a version with celery, see the Creole Sauce recipe in the Ball Blue Book (2014) on page 117. It requires pressure canning, though.

creole-sauce-101

Recipe source

  • Kingry, Judi and Lauren Devine. Ball / Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving. Toronto: Robert Rose. 2015. Page 367.

Modifications made:

  • Salt-free alternative;
  • Worked out equivalencies for starting from canned tomato.

 

History

The lack of celery is so glaring, one wonders why the recipe developers didn’t split the onion amount in half and test it for swapping in some celery instead.

However, the answer may be in the recipe’s age.

Celery’s place in the sauce, though taken for granted now, is actually quite recent, because celery didn’t make its way into Creole cooking until around the middle of the 1900s:

Before the latter half of the 20th century, celery was rarely used in Creole gumbo.” [1]Nobles, Cynthia Lejeune (2009). “Gumbo”. In Tucker, Susan; Starr, S. Frederick. New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-127-9. Page 113.

In 1934, the Ball Blue Book listed its Creole Sauce with no celery in it:

ball-creole-1934

Ball Creole 1934, Blue Book Edition R, page 23.

 

1953, celery finally appeared in Ball’s Creole Sauce, but only then as an option, and, the recipe required pressure canning.

ball-creole-1953

Ball Creole Sauce 1953, Blue Book Edition 26, page 48.

To be clear, the recipes cited above are for understanding of food and recipe development history only and are NOT for canning. Use only current versions of home canning recipes.

 

Nutrition information

Regular version

Per two tablespoons:

  • 11 calories, 27 mg sodium

creole-sauce-nutrition

 

Sugar-free version

Per two tablespoons:

  • 11 calories, 8 mg sodium

creole-sauce-nutrition-salt-free

* Nutrition info provided by https://caloriecount.about.com

* PointsPlus™ calculated by healthycanning.com. Not endorsed by Weight Watchers® International, Inc, which is the owner of the PointsPlus® registered trademark.

creole-sauce-103

References[+]

References
↑1 Nobles, Cynthia Lejeune (2009). “Gumbo”. In Tucker, Susan; Starr, S. Frederick. New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-127-9. Page 113.
Tagged With: Creole, Sauces, Tomatoes

Filed Under: Seasonal Summer, Tomatoes Tagged With: Creole, Sauces, Tomatoes

Reader Interactions

If you need FAST or relatively immediate canning help or answers, please try one of these Master Food Preserver groups; they are more qualified than we are and have many hands to help you. Many of them even operate telephone hotlines in season.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

SEARCH

HealthyCanning is a sub-project of cooksinfo.com. Read More…

What's New in Home Canning

What's New in Home Canning

Quote of the day

“…spoilage isn’t necessary when canning is no longer a matter of hit-and-miss luck, but a careful science, and when every home canner can have help from reliable sources.”

— USDA Radio Service. Housekeepers’ Chat. 14 September 1933.
Photo of miscellaneous canning equipment
kitchen window with fruit bowl
Ship with lifeboats
Ingredients for home canning
Home canning learning resources
what is pressure canning. Photo of pressure canners
Steam canning
water bath canning

Footer

↑ back to top

About

  • About this site
  • Privacy Policy
  • Copyright
  • Terms & Conditions

Newsletter

  • Sign Up! for emails and updates

Contact

  • Contact
  • Media
  • FAQ

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Copyright © 2021