I did see Mexican Tomato Sauce on NCHFP can be PCed in quarts (though until you scroll down to the tables for processing you don't see that, just under ingredients it says "Please read Using Boiling Water Canners before beginning.")

I guess it's possible that the kid (9-15) used an approved recipe and a PC - I won't even let my kid (on the young end of that scale) use a BWB, mainly b/c she's so short she can't even see into the 12-qt stockpot I use as a BWB. So maybe the parent did the PCing, like I put the jars in and took them out of the BWB for my DD.

I had mentioned that other fairs were asking for recipes, and emailed the NCHFP's fair judging guidelines to the fair email address last week but got no reply.

Is there anything you can do about it? Probably not if they aren't interested. If it is a state or county sponsored fair then they are subject to the guidelines but if the county/state extension chooses not to enforce them there is little you can do.

Dave

You could of course notify the appropriate agency that oversees these events but again, I wouldn't have any expectation anything will be done, due in part to short staffing and in part to ignorance/indifference.

In a lot of these cases someone has to get sick before anyone gets a clue.

Carol

DD was so cute - I filled the jars for her jelly, she was checking HS and wiping rims, putting the lids on so I could put in the canner for her. She asked "How much headspace?" I'm surprised she knew that word!

Too bad no ribbon for her - I used the Ball NS pectin, 3T for 4C of store-bought apple juice, mixed the pectin with 1/3C sugar as Marla suggested, it seemed to dissolve when she put it in the juice and stirred as it was heating, then she dumped in another 1C and 1/3C sugar all at once, I set the timer to boil 2 minutes and it started gelling as soon as I took it off the heat! I kept having to put it back on the burner as we were filling jars - and it was only 4 jars. So they're a bit cloudy, but at least the HS is correct LOL!

I'm glad she's so happy and knowledgeable. She will be a big help during season.

And ajsmama, mistakes at Fairs may happen more often than we would guess. I haven't been to many but clearly remember seeing a quart (QUART!) of tuna that should have only been in pts or half pts at a small rural fair one year. It had a ribbon.

DD's jelly (which was made from storebought juice so the juice was clear, we thought the candy and pectin was all dissolved before she added the sugar) did too - and the kids get really fancy ribbons with rosettes. She's over the moon, so I don't want to burst her bubble. One kid had a beautiful peach jelly - that got the blue too. DD's was the only "Other Jelly" so maybe that's why she got it, though I had the only "Other Jelly" in the adult class and only got a red for Apricot-Pepper (which I shouldn't have gotten at all, I had some beautiful stained-glass looking jelly from Carol's Confetti Jelly recipe but no pectin added, it wasn't set hard - I don't like hard jellies, esp. pepper jellies - so I put some vinegar and apricots in a pan, boiled, let stand overnight, opened the jars and added, then boiled it down hard - it set up all right, and all the peppers were at the top since it set so quickly I couldn't do the swirl thing after they'd cooled a little. It also turned kind of brown. Not my best effort but I didn't have anything else to submit in the "other" category. They said they won't change categories but we saw some in nuts (our hickory nuts won blue).

I did see some fresh peppers disqualified b/c they were sweet and had been submitted as hot, etc. And note on 1 canning entry (fruit, I forget what) about bottoms of jars not being clean. I guess it all depends on the judge.

Not many canning entries this year - I forget if we went last year (I didn't enter, too busy) but 2 years ago when I entered there were a lot of canned goods. This year the adult canning section took up 3 shelves, maybe 6-8ft long. One lady (I saw when I was dropping mine off) submitted 3 dozen jars of jam/jelly (3-5 per variety depending on whether it was single flavor or collection), I saw her name on pints/quarts of canned fruit too, there was another name that seemed to come up quite often (they display the names on the tags of the winning items after judging) that since there were so many ribbons awarded, only 2-3 entries in a few classes like strawberry jam, applesauce, peach jam, that there were most likely only half a dozen people who entered canned goods at all, another 3 did maple syrup and there were a few others who did dehydrated, vinegars, etc. that I didn't look closely at.