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Canning applesauce. It was boiling and jars sealed. After two weeks a little mold on some of the jars… do I have a problem? Can it be fixed now?
(From later information:)
The jars are completely sealed but on one or two there is a little discolored or s spot of mold. Not all of them
If dip that off the applesauce still taste good. I know years ago would skim off top of jams and still be ok.
If there's mold growing in your jars then something has gone wrong with your canning method. You may have bad seals or the processing has failed to kill off all microbes. Either way the food inside is unsafe and should be discarded. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to reprocess them, even if you kill all the microbes this time the food inside is likely spoiled.
Boiling water canning is only sufficient for applesauce where the acidity is high enough, the PH needs to be below 4.6. If your applesauce wasn't tart enough no amount of boiling would make it safe for long-term storage. Next time test your acidity and add some lemon juice if it's not acidic enough.
Hot applesauce into hot jars, lids on, then process in boiling water (or under steam pressure) is the "correct" method as far as I understand it. My reading of your post (awaiting clarification) is that the sauce was merely jarred and capped, with no additional heat processing step after capping.
Modern advice would have been to unjar, reboil, and (re)process if you had discovered the error within 24 hours, and is to discard, having discovered the problem weeks later.
