Home-made ketchup 🌭🍅

Today I will show you how to prepare homemade ketchup. I love that it's much healthier than ketchup which you can find in the shops and you can personalize the taste by adding the spices which you love.

Of course, it's vegetarian, as most of the recipes I publish. In fact, it's even vegan (🌿🌿)

Don't expect exactly the same flavor like you used to. It will be a bit different, as we don't use any artificial enhancers. The consistency will be a bit different too, but in my house, everyone loves it so much, that we are not buying ketchup in the supermarket anymore.

Ingredients (for approx 1 liter of ketchup):

🟢 900 ml of tomato puree
🟢300-400 ml of tomato concentrate
🟢100 ml of apple vinegar
🟢1 onion
🟢3 cloves of garlic
🟢1 spoon of coconut oil or any other oil
🟢Sugar, salt, pepper, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom seeds, chili and/or other spices you like

1️⃣

Mix 100 ml of apple vinegar with the spices. I add half of tsp of cinnamon, 1 tsp of pepper seeds, 1 tsp of cardamom seeds, and 1 tsp of cloves.
If you have a piece of cinnamon, it will work better than molded. Unfortunately, I didn't have it today.

2️⃣

Put vinegar with all the spices into the small pot, boil it, turn off the gas and cover the pot. Leave it like that for 20-25 minutes to let the vinegar absorb all the aromas of spices.

3️⃣

Chop the onion and garlic into small cubes.
You can cry, I know I did.

4️⃣

Put the spoon of coconut oil on the pan, add chopped onion and garlic, cover it, and stew on low heat for five minutes. If it will be absolutely necessary, you can add a spoon or two of water to not burn vegetables, but it's better to avoid it.

Coconut oil can be changed for clarified butter or, alternatively for olive oil

5️⃣

In the big pot boil tomato puree, concentrate of tomatoes mixed with the onion. Add an extra 1 tsp of cinnamon and 1 tsp of molded black pepper (if you want to make spicy ketchup, you can add more pepper or chili). Boil it for 10 minutes, mixing sometimes.

If you don't have tomato puree and concentrate, you can use 2,5-3kg of peeled tomatoes but get ready for at least 3 hours of cooking it, to achieve the good consistency of the ketchup.

I like to sacrifice one day every 2 months for preparing a lot of jars with tomato puree and concentrates to make cooking other days faster.

6️⃣

Add vinegar. Use a strainer to separate the spices.

Boil until the moment when you like the consistency of your ketchup. It should take 30-45 minutes. Remember to mix it constantly (it's good to watch Netflix or listen to audiobooks in the meantime)

7️⃣

It's time to add sugar and salt. I recommend you to add it little by little, each time mixing it well and checking if the taste satisfies us.
My ketchup contains 1,5 tbsp of sugar and 1 tsp of salt.

If you want to improve your ketchup with any other spices, now it's time to do it.

8️⃣

Some people like when their ketchup has the consistency of the sauce, I prefer to blend it. That step is optional.

9️⃣

Ketchup is ready. Keep it in the fridge, closed in the jar, for up to one month. If you want to keep your ketchup longer, you need to make pasteurization. Well pasteurized jars, when kept in a cold and dark places, can last up to one year.

Bon appetit!

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All the photos used in this post were made by me.

@papi.mati