Is it worth making your own ketchup?

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the world of processed food falls into three categories: things that are always better when you make them yourself, but are a hassle (such as bread); things that are always better and no hassle (pancakes); and things you can never make as well as the shops make them (tomato ketchup and a particular kind of chocolate cake that we will discuss another day). The third set is the most confusing – exactly what can a factory do that I can’t? It was in this fog that I embarked on a homemade ketchup.

I wanted a recipe penned by someone with a vested interest in the homemade variety; someone whose livelihood depended on it. Reader, I ended up on ikea.com. Ikea sells chic ketchup bottles, which nobody would buy without this specific storage need.

Peo Fredholm’s recipe (he is a Swedish chef) runs counter to everything you think you know about how food works. You don’t sweat the shallots and garlic – you chuck everything in the pan at the same time as the chopped tomatoes. These do not need skinning, apparently, although everything I know about liquidisers tells me that nothing gets rid of a tomato skin. So, I went off piste and skinned 20 very ripe tomatoes. It is much easier to skin them when they are not quite ripe. Besides, there is a proud feminist tradition of not being arsed to bother with such things (“Life is too short to stuff a mushroom,” Shirley Conran once wrote), so let’s just say they were about 70% skinned.

After adding a surprising amount of vinegar, a bit of salt and (off piste again, but surely not dangerously so) a bit of Worcestershire sauce, in went the sugar – about the same proportion you might put in a compote or biscuits. Ketchup is just an inventive word for “treacle”. I guess this is something we always knew and didn’t want to admit, like how battery chickens are treated and what goes into a cheap sausage.

Edited April 20, 2019 by - Dark
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