Ketchup, redux

Last weekend (namely Saturday) I decided to make ketchup again. Since I had knee surgery on September 3 and I'm still not walking, I decided not to start with whole tomatoes and have to cook them and mill them and whatnot. I started with cans of tomato puree, added the other ingredients, and cooked it down, and then canned it. Last night. More than 48 hours later.

I learned a few lessons from all this, lessons I hope that I will always remember:

1. DO NOT make more than one ketchup recipe at once. Unless you do it in separate pots. It took FOREVER to reduce.

and

2. DO NOT cook it over high heat at the beginning in an attempt to get things going faster. Unless you want to spend three days trying to clean burnt crap off the bottom of your pot.

The ketchup had a more complex flavor, either from being burned or from cooking for two days, or from both. But still. Never again.

Quick ketchup fix

I've posted about making ketchup previously. Recently we ran out of our homemade ketchup, which I made two summers ago with tomatoes from my garden. We had enough for about a year and a half, but lately we've made do with store-bought ketchup.

Today I'm at home all afternoon. My sister's bringing some frozen french fries over for dinner, and my husband was lamenting that the homemade ketchup is gone. Well, hang on a sec! We have cans of crushed tomatoes in the cupboard. I have several hours - I can make a mini-batch of ketchup!

And so, my friends, can you. It's easy, requires almost no work whatsoever, and since it's a small batch, if you eat it quickly there's no canning or anything else involved.

Small-batch ketchup

28 oz can of crushed tomatoes (without basil) or PLAIN tomato sauce
1/3 cup vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
1 whole clove
pinch of salt

Put on stove and bring to a very slow boil. Stir occasionally. It's done when it's as thick as you like it, about 2-3 hours.

Remember the ketchup?

I'm not sure I ever wrote about the ketchup I made - the last post I can find is about the long process of actually making it. Which turned out not to be all that long after all. Although my directions said to boil for 6-7 hours, I found that it was sufficiently thick after only 2-3 hours. I think I made around 6-7 small jars, which is plenty since we don't eat all that much ketchup.

I don't know how to describe it except that it's delicious. After Loris constantly telling me how superior his parent's homemade ketchup is, I expected it to have a very different taste from standard, store-bought or fast-food ketchup. The strange thing is that it really didn't - it tasted like ketchup. But a lot better. It didn't have that overly sugary sweetness (Loris was surprised to hear that his parent's recipe had any sugar at all). This tasted of fresh tomatoes, the tang of vinegar, the sweetness of a sprinkling of sugar, and that distinctive flavor of cloves that gives ketchup its, well, ketchupy taste.

Tuesday ... afternoon

Today is a busy day. My KitchenAid mixer arrived! But I've been too busy to even unpack it yet. I went out to the garden to turn the water on in the tomatoes. I have only been watering them about once a week, especially because we're having a rather mild summer here in Davis. But now I've lost track of the last time I watered them. They got about 3 hours of low-pressure watering today.

The ketchup situation is progressing. I kept two baskets of tomatoes out until they got pretty soft, then stuck them in the fridge last night (I was starting to worry about them going bad) - probably slightly more than 4.5 kilos overall. I washed them, then chopped them up and started feeding them into the machine. It was still tough to turn the handle, but what the heck, it worked! The output was a bit foamy. And then I started having problems because I think some of the solids eventually built up in the works and wouldn't let the liquid part of the tomato go through. In fact, I eventually just put the ketchup on the stove even though some of the liquid is sitting in the input funnel of the machine. I'm not sure what to do about that, especially since I might make a huge mess if I try to move the machine or take it apart. My current solution is to ignore the situation for the moment. I'll get back to it later.

So now it's on the stove ... for 4.5 kilos of tomatoes, I added .5 liters of vinegar, .4 kilos of sugar, 4 whole cloves, and a handful of salt. Loris is still getting back to me on the chili pepper question - I am against them (I don't tolerate those things). Now I just have to wait for it to boil 6-7 hours. And then can it. It's going to be hot in the kitchen today. More later, once I get my new toy out of its box (and run a BUNCH of errands).

Some notes

Tomorrow I try ketchup again. It takes 6-7 hours of cooking, so I need a day when I'm sure to be at home all day. Tomorrow seems auspicious.

My stand mixer didn't get delivered yet :( I sent it to Loris' office, and they tried to deliver it on a Saturday. So it arrives tomorrow! Hopefully they let him sign for it. I'm so excited!!!!!!!! It's going to be a beautiful silver color. Not as pretty as my old yellow mixer, though - this is the 600 series 6qt. mixer from KitchenAid, the largest they have available through standard retail. My last one, a yellow KitchenAid artisan, died when I overpowered the motor.

I just sorted my tomatoes - I have slightly more than 4.5 kilos soft, overripe ones for the ketchup, and almost 9 kilos that I'll save for more tomato sauce.

What I really want to do is roast peppers, but I only have a few, and it doesn't seem like a good idea to really heat up the oven for only a couple peppers. My peppers are so disappointing this year. One of the brown spots (that I think is a sunburn) has turned black in the fridge. Next year I'll have to figure out some way to prevent that particular problem.

The other problem I'm having right now is how to tell when my butternut squash is ripe. I think I picked my first melon before it was ripe - I'll have to cut it open just to be sure, but that's a bit of a disappointment.