homemade ketchup anyone??

[breezyhill]

hello all,
and to wonderwhy, who asked for the ketchup recipe.

sorry i have taken to long to post this, but every morning when i go out the garden i've been coming back to the house with more buckets of stuff than i have time to realistically can, or freeze.

i canned green beans last week, about 60 quarts, and then the tomatoes have started to ripen. i've been using the tail end of the green beans, the first ripening tomatoes, and the first ripening green peppers and onions, and zucchine, lots and lots of zucchini, to make what i call hodge-podge soup. i can it in quarts and pints to add to soups and sauces and casseroles the rest of the year.

add to that, the peaches were in at the local farmer we buy from, and i've spent the past three days with 4 bushels, canning them and making preserves and putting some freshly-made peach pie filling in the freezer.

whew, i'm ready for a break.

anyway, here is the ketchup recipe. we really like it. i'm not exactly exact when i make this, so each year the flavor alters a little bit. this is the basic recipe. i usually double it.

4 quarts tomato pulp
1/2 quart vinegar
3 cups sugar
6T salt
2t dry mustard
2t celery salt
2t onion salt
2t cinnamon
1t cloves
1-1/2t pepper
1T mixed pickling spice (optional)

mix all together and cook at slow simmer til nice and thick. i can't think off the top of my head what the timing requirements are for the canner. i'll have to find my book and edit this post to add it. i'm just too tired right now to go to the kitchen and get it.

did you know....
back in our grandmother and greatgrandmother's time they didn't put sweeteners in ketchup. it's only become a relatively recent (80 years) cookery change. i have lots of old-old-old cookbooks, i'll get a couple of them out and post the recipes for the old-timey ketchup,too.

debbie/breezyhill

 

[spinnerholic]

Thanks for posting the recipe - I've been looking for a good one myself.

Was surprised to learn that old time recipes didn't have any sweetener! Can't wait to see the reicpes you find in your old old cookbooks!! Thanks for offering to do all the work finding and then typing them for the rest of us.

 

[WonderWhy]

Dear Breezy debbie,

Many thanks for the wonderful recipe! Looks delicious! As I mentioned to you, last year I used the Joy of Cooking - famous for underseasoning things - and was disappointed with the results. However, I still have a bottle of ground mace from that effort - maybe I will use that instead of the optional pickling spice. Forgive me, I like to tinker, but I need a good starting place to begin with. Especially when the food is familiar to the family and they have expectations.

Your canning efforts are amazing! I can, but not in those quantities! You must have a slick system for getting it all done.

Thanks again for posting this.

 

[breezyhill]

oh WW,
you're so funny. my "slick" system is to stay up late and get up early.

one of my pet peeves for the past couple of years is that the pressure canners, i have two, one holds 7 quarts and one holds 4 quarts, take so dang long to "cool" down, so that i can get the next load going.

i used to have a problem with being in too much of a hurry and taking the jars out too early, and when i lifted the lid off the jars would be bubbling so madly that i would have liquid loss from the jars.

i have since learned to just leave the canners alone after i take them off the burners. even after they have cooled down enough to take the jiggler off. i'll wait about an hour and then open the lid and peek, and the jars are just slightly bubbling, and so i'll leave them alone for another half hour or so until they have really cooled down.

it really cuts down on liquid loss, and my failure rate now is a lot better. i've only had two jars in the past two weeks that didn't "take". before, i used to have a clunker every other canner load or two. i think it was the pressure of causing the liquid loss putting food particles up in the seal, and then they wouldn't seal.

well, what i would like to do is get another couple of canners, so that when the two i have are cooling, the other two could be on the stove.

the driving force for me is that for several years i have eaten all organic and if possible, home made. everything from homemade breads and desserts and meats. we raise our own meat chickens and get our beef and port from local farmers who raise organically.

the thing is, i just can't eat the stuff that i used to. if i do eat processed food, at family functions, or going out to eat...which i try to limit what i'm eating...i pay for it, stomaches, bathroom problems, etc..

so, what motivates me is knowing that this is my food supply. it is much, much cheaper to to this than it is to buy everything organic at the whole foods store. my labor is cheap.

my DH, on the other hand, can nibble and graze on anything, and he does, much to my dismay. he must have a cast iron stomach.

well, i'll get back here later and i'll post those old-timey ketchup without sugar recipes this afternoon.

p.s.; what got you into canning? is it something your mom did and you like to follow the tradition? does your family like home-canned food?

debbie

 

[WonderWhy]

p.s.; what got you into canning? is it something your mom did and you like to follow the tradition? does your family like home-canned food?

No, and not particularly.

The long answers: My mom grew up in California's central valley during the depression. That area is famous for very hot summers -- triple digits lots of times -- but of course they needed to can food to make ends meet and of course my mom had to help. She was very glad that she didn't have to do that as a married woman. We did have an apricot tree in our back yard and one year when I was young, she put up some apricot halves. She didn't check the seals well, apparently, and put them in the cupboard. Months later, there was an explosion of rotting fruit. That was the end of any attempt to can anything. Moreover, she was terrified of pressure cookers and wouldn't have one in the house.

My family puts up with my attempts to preserve food. Gradually I'm learning to make things that taste ok, and we're all gratified by that. Their dad loved wonder bread and all factory foods and once when I made something from scratch asked me what made me think I could compete with professional cooks? [My life is sooo much better without him!]

What got me into canning? Two things -- as a young adult I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called Mormons) and we are encouraged to preserve food. When I first joined long ago, most of the young mothers I knew did a lot of canning, so there was cultural as well as doctrinal encouragement.

The second thing was a desire to eat and live better. Close family friends when I was a child were couples who were older than my grandparents, so I was accustomed to people in their 60s and 70s being healthy achieving interesting folk. And these people were smokers! But as I begin to age, I see many, many people in their 40s and 50s begin to fall apart and their doctors don't seem to have been much help. Eating better seems to be an important part of living better.

Although your husband seems to be ok with the occasional junk food, I'm certain that your efforts will preserve his health in the long run.

Oh -- another part of my first reason -- someone we regard as a prophet, Marion G. Romney, said that "We will see the day that we will live on what we produce." Because I believe him, it seems important to learn to produce and preserve. Not that I'm good at it, but I am trying.

 

[Cardinal]

BBQ sauce

I use this recipe in place of ketchup and throw in some butter, about 2 Tbs, to make it richer, and I love the taste.




1 cup tomato sauce
3 T worcestershire sauce
1 T vinegar
1 t liquid smoke
3 pkts Splenda
Combine all ingredients and cook over low heat for 10 min.
Total: 23 carbs, 3 fiber (20 NET carbs, 105 Calories, trace fat, 4 protein.
Makes 16 T (1 cup) @ 1.2 carbs ea.

 

[peachfuzz]

zucchine, lots and lots of zucchini, to make what i call hodge-podge soup. i can it in quarts and pints to add to soups and sauces and casseroles the rest of the year.

some freshly-made peach pie filling in the freezer.

Hey, I'm interested in your hodge-podge and your freezer peach pie filling when you have a chance!

Thanks,
pf