Catching up on the Ketchup

Having spent a couple of days thinking about which recipe I would use from the multitude that exist online, I decide to go for River Cottage's one, with a couple of tiny tweaks. Here's a shot of the toms, onions and pepper starting to reduce:



I then struggle to do the sieving bit. It's a pain, and so I get lazy and resort to a hand blender (besides, it's more fun, and I rarely get an excuse to use the thing). I worry slightly now if the skins might go hard whilst in storage... time will tell.

Anyway, I blend and bash the broken down mush through a metal sieve into a bowl and then pour back into the pan, adding woody bits and acid as required by the recipe. It's starting to look a bit more like ketchup now:



Simmer, simmer, simmer (warning, you might want your laboratory goggles to hand - hot acidic ketchup in the eye is not a pleasurable experience, and this panful of goo seems to enjoy its little attempts to impersonate an Icelandic geyser every now and then).

In the meantime, I proceed make an utter mess of the kitchen trying to sterilize just one ex-chutney-jar and one ex-ketchup-bottle (I went for the stick jars and lids in the oven at > 100C for 15 minutes approach in the end, although only after soaking them in boiling water first). I don't recommend following my guidance on this though, since sterilizing is a serious business. I personally don't plan on pushing the life of this batch beyond the 1 month mark...

After letting the sauce cool down in a bowl (and coercing it through the sieve one more time to get rid of the big spicy bits and bobs), I then manage to get sauce everywhere except the intended target when trying to teaspoon it into an ex-branded ketchup bottle, having failed my earlier funnel hunt in town.



In the end, I now have two containers of home-made ketchup (which tastes a little too much like mulled wine if I'm completely honest). I reckon that in two generations time, the Rothwell-Hughes Sauce Company will be a FTSE 100 star...