Question by andvia: how long does canned tomato juice keep?
I have some tomato juice my cousin canned into tins a few years ago. The county he lives in has a public cannery, so it is in regular tin cans. How long does it keep?
Thanks for the answers. I thought two years was a good guess but hoped I could add it to some soup. Okay, into the trash it goes.
Andy,
Richmond, Virginia
Best answer:
Answer by Ginger
Maybe two years max. Is this in the US?
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discard it.
Check the can for a best used by date. If it’s over the date, it doesn’t necessarily mean the product is bad.
Tomato juice is pretty acidic. You’ve probably noticed that even the store-bought kind, if it’s in a can rather than in a bottle or a tetra-pak, will often have a noticeable metallic flavor from the acid in the juice interacting with the metal can. This is also why better brands of tomato juice, tomato sauce, tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, pureed tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, etc. will have a coating on the inside of the can to prevent that acid-and-metal reaction from affecting the taste of the product.
If this public cannery (which is a neat thing to have! What county is this?) has coated cans available for the public to use when canning acidic products like tomato juice, it might still be okay…
How many years is “a few”? Two? Three? Five? Five would definitely be pushing it with a coated can, and I doubt an uncoated can would’ve made it three years.
You can sometimes tell when canned food has spoiled in general if it seems to be trying to escape from the can, making it swell or leak. Tomato products in uncoated cans will eventually eat their way right through the metal can — I saw this happen once at the home of an older lady with Alzheimer’s, I have no idea how many years that took, and of course she couldn’t tell me.
The general rule is “when in doubt, throw it out” — you could just open a can or two, though. It should be easier to tell when you can see (and smell) what’s inside.