Building Block: Homemade Tomato Ketchup

If you have an allergy, shopping at the supermarket can be a little more fraught with pitfalls than your average consumer, and you can’t always escape that desperate scroll through a laundry list of ingredients by going to a farmer’s market or signing on for a CSA. A lot can depend on how a food item is stored or processed, what it’s been sprayed with, and even what field the food is near (I’m looking at you, raw honey!). In short, finding food that’s safe for you and your family when there’s a food allergy in play can be a lot of ‘trial’ as well as the horrible frustration of a whole lot of ‘error.’

How this works out for me, is that there are many store-made foods I just can’t have, even when the ingredients list works in my favor. Soup stock, alternative milks, and many condiments are on this list, and even though I’m still trying to find some of these items, there is simply no guarantee that I’ll succeed.

Thus, I have brought to you today….a recipe for ketchup! No, I know! Actual ketchup! It’s a thing you can make!  I was also surprised. There are just some foods that you don’t think about cooking up until fate or craving sort of forces you into scouring your bookshelf for incredibly old recipes.

Many of those recipes resembled something more like the Brown Sauce you find in the UK, or like a thickened version of Worcestershire Sauce which wasn’t what I wanted at all. In my head, ketchup is a tomato-based delight, slightly sweet, but with an underlying tart saltiness and a smooth thickened texture. I wanted a sauce I could drag a fry through and have it come out clinging to the potato rather than drip off the side, if you know what I mean.

Finally, I settled on an approximation of all the recipes I had seen, only drastically reduced because if I failed at this recipe, I didn’t want to be saddled with cup after cup of some nasty tasting marinara. So I made some substitutions, did some highly suspect math, and complained endlessly to my friends via text that I was going to burn my ketchup like some city slicker who just arrived on the prairie. I could sense the ghosts of my ancestors rising up to judge me (my grandmother, in particular, just wanted me to keep trying with store-bought.)

Short story, I did not burn anything! (I did take about a ½ inch of skin off my ring finger, but that’s an unrelated incident). And the result was…ketchup! Actual, real-tasting, tried and true tomato ketchup! I felt so accomplished, I can’t even tell you.

But it also impressed upon me how much time and investment making ketchup is. A little over two pounds of tomatoes produced ½ cup of actual ketchup. All the recipes I found called for immense amounts of ingredients, at a cost today which most people (including me) might honestly find prohibitive, not just in money, but in time spent cooking. That’s the trade off with a lot of allergy-friendly products: what others can just pluck off the shelf, we have to devote time and thought and money to achieving.

So this is my admittedly delicious, but scaled down recipe for tomato ketchup. It’s easily adjusted to create more, but I honestly recommend creating a small batch of the stuff—as I did—to make sure you like the flavor and want to devote the time to making the product. I think making this recipe greatly increased my confidence in the kitchen (I made a condiment! Me!). It feels really good to know that I can still have something, even if all the store-bought varieties so far make me itch.

You’ll Need (serves 1):

~2 lbs. tomatoes

water, for boiling

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

1 large clove garlic

1 tsp. white sugar

¾ tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. nutmeg

¼ tsp. onion powder

1/8 tsp. paprika

Wash your tomatoes and add them to a large pot with a lid. Pour in enough water to cover the tomatoes, and then bring them to boil on the stove top. Once the tomatoes have split, remove from the stove and drain the water.

Using a fine mesh strainer and a spoon, or a berry press, press the juice and pulp out of the tomatoes back into the pot you just used. Make sure to scrape the bottom of the strainer to get all the good stuff!  Add in all the rest of the ingredients, and then reduce the sauce on low to medium-low for three hours, or until the sauce resembles ketchup. It should be thick enough to part with a spoon and it should definitely stick to the back of said utensil. Stir frequently to make sure that the sugars don’t burn. Allow it to cool completely before putting it into the refrigerator.

Additional Comment:

Around 2 lbs. of tomatoes yielded ½ cup of ketchup.

If you’re scaling up this recipe, please remember that this is a heavily reduced condiment so all the flavors will be quite concentrated. Less is definitely more!  Also, if you’re worried about the amount of nutmeg, try substituting with mace instead.