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Tomato Ketchup Recipe with Fresh Tomatoes
Make your own delicious tomato ketchup with fresh tomatoes
Tomato Ketchup Recipe With Fresh Tomatoes
preserving | recipes | grow your own
Making your own tomato ketchup with fresh tomatoes is a labour of love, but well worth the effort. By making it yourself you can cook it to your exact tastes - as salty, sweet, or spicy as you like it - save money, and use up a glut of tomatoes.
Because of the amount of work involved, it is best to make one large batch of ketchup at a time. It preserves well in jars or cans.
Choosing the Tomatoes
It is possible to make ketchup from any tomato variety, however the best tomatoes for tomato ketchup are called paste tomatoes such as Roma (pictured below).
Beefsteak tomatoes are also excellent. Good ketchup tomatoes have a low water content and thick meaty flesh. (The last thing you want are soft watery old tomatoes.)
If you are growing your own tomatoes to make ketchup then it is worth planning ahead and ensuring that the variety you are planting will be good in ketchup as well as growing well in the climate in which you will grow them.
Preparing the Tomatoes
The tomatoes will need washing first, and then their skins need to be removed. This can be achieved very easily by blanching the tomatoes a few at a time for around one minute in a large pan of boiling water. Lift the tomatoes out of the hot water and plunge them immediately into icy water. The skins will almost fall off the flesh by themselves - a quick pull and they will come away from the flesh in one piece.
Next, since we do not want watery ketchup, the seeds need to be removed. Cut each tomato in half, gently squeeze it, and then scoop out the seeds and excess water with a spoon. This ketchup 'waste product' and be used in soups and sauces to enhance flavour.
The tomato pieces need then to be put into a sieve or held in muslin or cheese cloth to enable most of the remaining loose water to drain off. Again this need not go to waste since it is delicious fresh tomato juice!
Cooking the Tomatoes
Put the tomatoes into a large pan and slowly simmer together with some chopped onions, garlic chopped into a paste, a little salt and pepper, and sugar to your taste. You may also want to add some other flavourings such as mustard, chilli pepper, worcestershire sauce, cinnamon etc.In a separate pan at the same time tie up some celery seed in muslin or cheese cloth and add cider vinegar - one cup of vinegar per tablespoon of celery seeds. Simmer this for 30 minutes adding vinegar so that at the end of the process you have the same amount of liquid that you started with.
Making the Ketchup
After cooking the tomatoes for 30 minutes they will be very mushy. Pass the contents of the pan through a sieve to remove any remaining tomato seeds and skin. To the strained tomato sauce add the celery seed seasoned vinegar (with the seed bag removed), tasting to make sure that you are happy with the level of acidity and flavour.This final mixture now needs to be reduced to give it the consistency of ketchup. This can be achieved in a slow cooker (crockpot) over night, or in a pan on a low heat stirred regularly for a few hours.
Your finished ketchup can now be canned or bottled following the usual procedures for safe sterilisation and preservation. Adding a good dash of lemon juice will help reduce the chance of spoilage.
Article Published: 11:02, 22nd Nov 2010
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