Help.
I go to bed thinking about my ketchup. I wake up craving my ketchup. I have been obsessed with homemade ketchup for three days now. I'm on Batch No. 6 trying to find my favorite recipe with no end in sight.
Which is dangerous for me, because I'm eating a lot of veggie burgers and fries lately...
What I've learned in my experiments so far...
- I am sticking with 6oz. cans of tomato paste. So nice to be able to whip up a fresh batch when I want it, though it does keep nicely for a week in the refrigerator. I've found that letting the flavors meld overnight in the refrigerator gives a better balanced ketchup.
- Different brands of tomato paste have different thicknesses. Usually the cheaper store brands are thinner and the premium brands thicker. I prefer the thicker stuff because I can add more vinegar taste while keeping the ketchup thick. I will never go back to thin, pourable ketchup ever again.
- I like sweeter ketchup. Not sickly sweet, but with a little extra sugar to make it more like candied tomatoes.
- I don't add salt. And if I do, it's barely any because the food I put it on is salted. Even if there's no salt on the food, I still prefer ketchup without.
- For that reason I don't add any "salted" spices like celery salt and garlic salt.
- The most common "kick" of spice in recipes I've found is cayenne pepper. But I prefer chili powder. It has a more pleasing complexity to it. And it doesn't take much to be noticed. But once you go past the point where it's noticed, the heat makes a very tasty sauce indeed. Fries with ketchup that's got some heat to it? Magic.
- One of the things I've tried in my experiments is eliminating ingredients to see which spices aren't contributing to the flavor. Turns out they're all important. Not only that, but the more variety of spices I add the better it tastes to me. I prefer ketchup with smaller amounts of more spices than larger amounts of less spices. The most surprising? Celery seed powder. In my 6oz. can recipe, I only use around 1/8 teaspoon of the stuff, but it really makes a difference. Makes me happy that I accidentally bought the powder instead of the seeds.
- One of the varieties I've happened upon that I really love is double oregano ketchup (which I'm calling "Italian Ketchup"). And where it's best used? As pizza sauce! Seriously! No more buying jars of prepared pizza sauce from the stores either. This stuff is amazing on a toasted bagel then broiled with mozzarella cheese on top.
- After I go through all the usual spices like black pepper, garlic powder, oregano, onion powder, chili powder, mustard, celery powder... I've been experimenting with others. The best I've found are some of the African spices I've been addicted to. Mostly blends like Berbere, Ras El Hanout, and The Spice House Marrakesh Market Blend. Many include a touch of "warm" spices like cinnamon or cumin or cardamom blended with peppers and such. Even small amounts add really cool complexity to the flavor profile.
I never realized just how bad ketchup is from the store. Even the premium brands are watery and boring. But after making my own? There's really nothing better. And the fact that you can customize it so easily makes to make a condiment that suits your individual tastes? Perfect.
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I highly recommend you keep doing you and experiment with what you like. I have a ketchup recipe I developed over time and I used pineapple jam in place of other sugar and when I make this I tend to make several batches at once (I bought multiple crock pots just to make this easier…..I did eventually get some older & larger cheap ones at the thrift store that worked well). Once I have my batches I blend them together and water bath can in half-pint jars. That makes it worthwhile for me.
Again, you do you, but you might steal some ideas…..
Hmmm… I dunno about pineapple jam. I tried using honey in a batch and it had a very different taste that I didn’t like as well as straight sugar. Most of your other ingredients seem very similar to what I’m doing. Though I don’t want water anywhere near my recipe! I love spreadable ketchup instead of pourable ketchup. Though I’d imagine it cooks down quite a bit since you’re cooking it?
The water is there more to prolong the cooking time, which sounds counter-intuitive, so I added a note to the blog post. Tomatoes just do better when exposed to a longer cook time.
As far as the pineapple jam, I get no pineapple taste from it and it was a simple sugar swap. I’m sure it adds something, but not what I would expect. It’s too subtle. I had just made a metric buttload of the stuff and started subbing it in for sugar in cooking and liked the results.
Home made ketchup sounds just delightful.