ALL foods must be properly processed. You did nothing to preserve that food. Also, it may not have been just mold if you did not add the necessary bottled lemon juice or citric acid to each jar.
You should throw away the jars and all.Do not open them and try to save the jars.
Please, get a current Ball Blue Book and learn to process foods safely to keep yourself free from food borne illnesses.
Botulism can grow in improperly canned low acid foods. Tomatoes need to be acidified in order to be canned.
They are not high acid, but borderline acidic.

Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP safely canning tomatoes.

Aside from the food safety issues Linda Lou mentioned, the method you used (called open kettle canning) is much more wasteful as the loss rate through spoilage is higher.

So yes, do boiling water bath following current guidelines. Without heat processing you just seal in the spoilage agents.

Carol

Did you really mean that you filled the jars and then did no processing on them as we are assuming from your post? If so then you may want to review the canning guidelines. There are no provisions for canning tomato sauce, or any other food except perhaps jam/jelly, without either processing it in a BWB or a pressure canner. It is both a safety and a quality issue that needs to be taken seriously. The link below will be quite helpful.

Or perhaps you mean you pressure canned them but you found mold growing around the seal edges? That can happen as a result of siphoning during processing. That is why it is recommended that all the jars be well washed, especially around the seal rims, once they have cooled, sealed, and the bands are removed. Hot soapy water works or you can even add a bit of vinegar to the water and wash them well before storing.

Hope this helps.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP

I realize I didn't follow the prescribed method for preserving tomato sauce. The question is would the boiling water bath prevent mold or is the presence of mold more to do with sterilizing jars and utensils.

PS I asked for a boiling water bath for Christmas -- maybe birthday of Fathers' Day.

The BWB - pints for 35 min, quarts for 40 min - would prevent the mold IF the sauce recipe used was a safe one to begin with. If it was low pH, not properly acidified, and/or had a lot of added sugar or other low acid ingredients then pressure canning would be required to prevent problems.

Molds are all around us in the air and on surfaces so sterilizing is no guarantee against it. It is the use of tested recipes and proper processing that guarantee no mold, or other, problems.

And no special container is required for a BWB. Any pot with a lid that is deep enough to hold the jars, a dish towel on the bottom for them to sit on and 1-2" of water above the jars works fine. Then all you have to worry about is using a safe recipe.

Dave

Thanks

Hot pack simply means the food is packed hot in the jars (before processing) vs raw pack where the food is put in the jars raw before it is processed.

You mistook hot pack as a way to preserve the tomato's. When it is really in essence a preference for filling the jars. Toss the tomato's in a way that your animals will not be able to eat them. IE don't put them in the compost pile if your chickens can get to them.

I agree, you don't need a special canner to hot water bath process, I did it for years in a soup pot with a dishcloth folded in the bottom. The cloth does float up until you get jars on top of it, but it can be dealt with. Someone here wired some jar rings together and used that as a rack, I thought it was pretty ingenious.

Open kettle canning is, as Carol mentioned, wasteful (even for jam and jelly) because there is more spoilage, as well as unsafe in most applications. I don't think that sterilizing or cleaning better is going to help, you need to process the items.

Annie