My ketchup recipe is so fun to make, and I can't wait to do it myself. We are waiting for our tomatoes to turn red.
You take, like, 8 pounds of tomatoes and a few onions and peppers, clean them up, cut the seeds out of the peppers. But just core the tomatoes and you can keep the skins on. Then have 3 cups of white vinegar ready. You need a blender for this. Just put some vinegar in your blender and start blending tomatoes, etc. and pouring it into a big roaster. Pour some in the roaster and leave some in the blender to keep blending until all of the vegetables are ground up.
Now add to the tomato mixture in the roaster:
3 cups of sugar
3 tablespoons of salt
1 and a half teaspoons of allspice
a fourth teaspoon of cloves
1 and a half teaspoons of cinnamon
Well, that's how the recipe goes, anyway. I follow the recipe up to the spices, pretty much. But I add garlic and black coarsely ground pepper. If I had a mildly hot pepper, I may add that. Well, the recipe here says you can add a fourth teaspoon of hot pepper. But I will add fresh garlic, chives, basil and marjoram from my garden. I will put the herbs in when I am blending the tomatoes. But you don't need all these herbs. Oh, I hate to follow recipes ... it makes me crazy. Anway, you do need to have the right amount of vinegar and sugar and salt. But then I am on my own.
So, anyway, you take your blended mixture and put it in the oven and let it cook all day on a low temperature, uncovered ... no lid. My recipe says 325 for 4 hours, or until it is reduced to half the liquid. But I think that is too high of a temperature. I would put it at about 300 for the day. You gotta check it often. And I leave mine in the oven after it is cooked down for the day. And then the next day, I put it in pint jars ... it makes like about 5 pints. But I leave it to rest in the oven so that more liquid will evaporate and it will get thicker. You want it rich and thick.
It's so much fun to make! On the day I make ketchup, I plan to stay home all day, of course. And imagine the Home Sweet Home smell of the house. I have had folks drop by when I am making this and they say, "What is that you are cooking in the oven? It smells so good." Then I open my oven and show them and they ask all about it. Papa loves it, as his mom always made it at home. I am sure she didn't have a blender. But she probably just peeled all the tomatoes and then cooked them and smashed them up with a potato masher, or she may have used her meat grinder for all the onions and peppers.
The old time Mothers chopped vegetables finely with just a sharp knife. The old Italian Mothers made a lot of spagetti sauce in the summer. They would cook down the tomatoes and spices all day in their big pots on the stove ... can't you just imagine the smell of the tomatoes and garlic and onions and peppers? The fresh garden herbs like basil and parsley. Well, anyway, after they cooked this down, they would put the sauce on big boards with sides? And they would put this in the sun and let it dry in big sheets. Then after these big slabs were dry? They would roll this dried sauce up and store it in vats of olive oil. Then in the winter they would hack off a piece of this and use it for spaghetti sauce. They would add water to it and cook it.
If I had a lot of fresh tomatoes, that would be fun to do. I would never do this with store tomatoes. All of that poison they spray with -- and you can't get that spray off -- and then to preserve your sauce in poison? I don't think so. But if you can grow your own fresh produce, you know it hasn't been sprayed. I do not spray anything I grow. Because I have herbs that grow wild in my yard. And I have herbs that grow everywhere. Like unruly children, they get out of the garden and run all over like wild Indians. I like it like that.
