I'm going back to grad school, and you're coming with me.
Part 3: Homemade Ketchup
Yep, we made our own ketchup. You know what? You can buy it in a bottle, but with all that high fructose corn syrup you’d never know it started out as a tomato. Not so with ours!
Again we turn to Mark Bittman (if you haven’t noticed, he’s our go-to guy. His book is called How to Cook Everything, after all.) Ketchup is basically tomatoes, a few other aromatic veg, and spices. We used our pickling spice along with the aromatics, cider vinegar, tomato paste, brown sugar and cayenne to make some tangy, flavorful and distinctive ketchup. The whole assembly takes about 2 hours of simmering on the stove, but you don’t have to do much other than stir occasionally.
You do need some special equipment to make ketchup successfully. An immersion blender is really the best tool for the job, so you can blend the bejesus out of your ketchup in the same pot you made it in. A food processor would also work, but then you have to deal with transferring hot liquid from pot to pot, and I’m not a fan of that.
Once you’ve blended the ketchup to a smooth consistency, it has to cool. Tempting though it may be to eat it while hot, I have to say it’s a little weird. We transferred the ketchup to a wide metal bowl and stuck it in the freezer for a few minutes to cool down, and then used a funnel (what, you don’t have a funnel?) to get it into bottles to store for later.
Let me tell you, our ketchup tasted great with our homemade fries!
