Homemade Ketchup!

When Jami and I were living in Tucson, Arizona we were doing several things to prepare food storage.  Jami bought a really nice “All-American” pressure canner.  We had been canning a few things and we decided to can some homemade ketchup as we had a bunch of tomatoes.  We didn’t start until after our son was in bed, so it was definitely a late start to be starting some canning, probably about 9 o’clock.  I believe it was a Saturday night and we had morning church the next day, so we were trying to do it quickly and figured it wouldn’t take too long to make ketchup.  Just boil and mash up some tomatoes, add some spices, can them in some jars and WA-LA we have some canned ketchup.  Might be a bit of a late night, maybe finish up around midnight, but not too bad.  

The recipe is from a book called “Canning for a New Generation,” which to this day has never failed us to make delicious canned food!  And the spices for each recipe are different than your typical recipe and just add a specialness to each recipe such as “Plum Cardamom Jam” and “Ginger Pear Preserves.”  Yum!  I seriously love this book.  Everlasting credit to the author Liana Krissoff!—whom I have never met, but I am sure is a truly wonderful and blessed person. 

 

This recipe for “Good Ketchup” calls for many delicious spices to make it so good.  And it literally is the best ketchup I have ever had in my life.  Slightly spicy and has a great little zing.  The only problem was that we didn’t read the directions all the way through before we started.  Which is a chronic habit that continues to give me grief at times.  I just don’t like reading all of the directions first.  Everything was actually going pretty smoothly.  However, we were both already getting fatigued after we had put the recipe all together and ran the giant pot of ketchup through a strainer to remove all the tomato skin giblets.  I remember the unfortunate shock we both received when we read the next section of directions.  “Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, stirring frequently to prevent the solids from sticking at the bottom, until thick; this could take as long as 2 hours.”  Wow.  I wish I had read the directions before we started!  We both looked at each other and didn’t know what to do.  Should we just scrap it and dump the whole giant pot of ketchup down the drain?  No, we were too economical to do that.  Should we just put it in the fridge and just deal with it tomorrow?  We didn't know if canning projects can be interrupted halfway through without ruining them.  We’ll just muscle through it deal with this we decided.  Ugh.  It was going to be a LONG night. 

 

It was already 11 p.m. or midnight at that point.  Jami may have been pregnant at the time (most likely was), so I will pat myself on the back here and point out one of the FEW truly selfless things I have done in my life, and may it buy me a spot in heaven, I told her she could go to sleep and I would do the simmering and stirring for the next couple of hours.  Not to say that I was doing it with a completely benevolent heart.  I honestly was angry, as I usually am when I have my already deficient amount of sleep reduced.  How often is “stirring frequently” anyway?  I have had several recipes ruined by being tainted with that burnt taste because something wasn’t stirred frequently enough.  Well, I didn’t want that to happen to this giant pot of special ketchup that was oh so promising and was going to be preserved for our years-worth of condiment and probably be given as gifts to family and friends.  I determined that frequently was every 5-7 minutes.  So, I set a timer for 7 minutes, and laid down and promptly fell to sleep.  Woke up with a groan in 7 minutes when the timer went off, and stirred.  And repeated this process for the next two hours deep into the night.  That is one good thing about me, I can fall asleep within a minute or two of laying down.  And at some point in the middle of all of this, I began to find some humor in this and to chuckle at myself at the ridiculousness of the situation.  It made the situation a little less miserable. 

 

Somehow I got through this process, and at the end of the two hours, I woke my groggy wife up and we began to transfer the ketchup into the sterilized jars at around 1 or 2 in the morning.  Each batch had to be boiled for 20 minutes, another blow to our weary eyes.  We slept as they boiled and woke up when it was time to remove the ketchup and sterilize another set of jars and put some ketchup in them.  After several batches, we finally finished.  There is hardly a more rewarding sound to me than to hear that “POP!” sound of when the jar seals a few minutes after coming out of the boiling canner.  It is so rewarding and is a little extra sweet in the middle of the night for some reason--which seems to be when we do mostbofbbnour canning anyway.  I think we finished up around 3 a.m.  And we went to sleep for a few hours and slept like rocks. 

 

We did end up sharing some of our homemade ketchup.  I think everyone enjoyed it, although they didn’t know of the extra-sweet love we put in for them as we toiled through the long, sleepless and scarring night!  Quote from our old blog “A Bit Backward” (which is no longer public) written by my wife states, “I’ve decided we’re never buying store-bought ketchup ever again!”  Uh yeah, we have never made it again, but I still remember how it tasted.  After about 10 years, I think I am ready to make it again, however this time I will start earlier in the day!