My tomato sauce is all dated, best by 8/2010, but my tomato sauce never goes bad, my old tomato paste though, gets where it kind of explodes when I puncture the can to open it, after throwing a few of those away, I started using them anyway, and it didn’t hurt me, but I am curious what the explosive spitting is about.
To be on the safe side, now, this is just my opinion, I would not risk using a can that bulged or “erupted” as you say.
The “eruption” is most likely hydrogen. Most acid-metal reactions release hydrogen as a byproduct.
The problem being that you might believe cans never go bad, but they can and do. There might be imperceptible dents in them. The machinery that seals the cans is 99.999999...% good, but not perfect. And even though the heating/pressurized process of canning kills off the bacteria, it is one of those bell curve situations where once in a while, rare as it is, a botulism spore might survive.
Most food safety experts will actually lean in the other direction, saying if you have ANY reason to suspect the food might be contaminated, to pitch it.
The problem being that in fact most food poisonings will do no worse than give you a fever and a bad case of the runs, there are a couple of them, most notably botulism, that are so poisonous if you stirred the food while heating it and tasted it off the spoon, you’d be dead in hours. It only takes like nanograms of the stuff...