For Camp Rainbow's Veggie Week, my friend Isabel suggested making ketchup/catsup with the kids. Perfect! A trip to the farmer's market for veggies...
After discussion and perusing some recipes, we decided more than one batch would be fun. Ketchup isn't made from just tomatoes and there are a lot of styles out there, so we could do a taste test.
Chopping veggies...
Nikki's batch, made ahead of time by her hubby, John, was mostly tomato and onion. Isabel's recipe was from a Dutch cookbook and had the same ingredients, but also apples and raisins.
I used the 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking, scaling the recipe down so it used 3 pounds of tomatoes rather than 13. (Click HERE for a handy online tool for converting a recipe to more or less servings.) In addition to tomatoes, the recipe calls for onion, mild red pepper, brown sugar, allspice, cloves, mace, celery seed, peppercorns, cinnamon, mustard, garlic, bay leaf, and cider vinegar. Whew!
Cooking it all down...
After everything in the pot was cooked soft, I used an immersion blender, strained it, and then blended it again. It could have used a little more cooking down, but the result was a yummy, medium-thick sauce. Isabel and I had recipes that yielded ketchup within about an hour. Nikki's recipe cooked down for ten hours over low heat! (We're now contemplating crock pot ketchup.)
What do you put homemade ketchup on for a taste test? Homemade french fries, of course.
From left to right...
My sauce was watery but had rich, spicy flavor like chutney.
Nikki and John's sauce had classic ketchup flavor and was the kiddo fave.
Isabel's sauce had a fruity depth to it.
All of them were wonderful alone or swirled together.
It was a little stunning that three pounds of tomatoes became less than two cups of ketchup. The Heinz and Hunt companies must go through box cars of tomatoes to churn out all those squeeze bottles of the stuff. But I plan to make ketchup again. It is so much fun to play around with various ingredients and come up with a signature flavor.
Camp Rainbow:
A summer play/exploration group for kids and their families
Explanation of Camp Rainbow
Week One: Careers and Jobs -- Restaurant and Bank
Week One: Careers and Jobs -- Pizza Parlor
Week Two: Native Americans
Week Three: Wet and Wild (water creatures and wetland habitats)
Week Three: Wet and Wild -- Home Aquarium
Week Four: Natural History (mud pies and fake rain count, right?)
Week Five: Art All Around Us -- Georgia Museum of Art
Week Five: Art All Around Us -- Patterns
Week Six: Produce -- Fruit -- Berry Picking
Week Seven: Produce -- Veggies -- Making Homemade Ketchup
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