I made spicy ketchup again
During 2020 and 2021, when I spent a LOT of time at home, I got really into making condiments. It's surprisingly easy to make condiments - for some reason, I had the idea that making sauces was harder than making "regular ass food", and I'd been avoiding it for literally decades. But it's not harder! If anything, it's often easier! And if you have an immersion blender, it's sometimes even brainlessly easy!
My favorite two condiments to make were ketchup and thai peanut sauce. In particular, I liked making low-or-no-sugar spicy ketchup flavored with birds-eye peppers I was growing on my balcony.
I recently had reason to cook a fuck ton of spicy ketchup again. When I went back to the Google doc we'd created with all our lockdown recipes on it, I was distressed to find the ketchup instructions that I'd written down five years ago:
Ketchup
- 1-2 cans of tomato sauce
- Vinegar
- Cornstarch (amount ??) or arrowroot (2 spoonfuls mixed in cold water)
- Cayenne pepper or chili garlic sauce
- Pour tomato sauce into a saucepan. Add come amount of vinegar. (We are eyeballing it… not sure how much yet.)
- In a small ingredient bowl, mix cornstarch with water.
- Mix cornstarch into the tomato sauce mixture. Stir thoroughly.
- Heat over high heat until it bubbles like a witch's brew.
- Transfer into new container and chill.
Huhhh??? I was kind of surprised to not see measurements on my own recipe. I usually recorded them! I didn't remember just eyeballing all the ketchups I'd ever made!
But I had to eyeball it. And I had only one can of tomato sauce, one can of tomato paste, and one fresh tomato from my mother-in-law's garden. And I only had dry chili crisp my friend gave me for Christmas. So I had to change a lot of things... I had to immersion blend it, for one, which I'd never done before, because I'd never used a whole tomato in a ketchup before. I also had to add way the fuck more cornstarch than I anticipated to get the texture right, and it took me much longer to cook down the vinegar than I remembered. But I did end up with a fuck ton of spicy ketchup that tastes like ketchup:
I used one cup of vinegar here - so if you're also making a fucked up ketchup with three different types of tomato, you can use that measurement.
It's good!! I recommend doing this! It's certainly cheaper to buy your own condiments at the store, but if you want to make everything spicy (I do) or take most of the sugar out of everything (I want this also), I recommend it.
Making Thai peanut sauce is also insanely easy. Other sauces I made a fuck ton of during lockdown include toum and teriyaki sauce. Making all this ketchup made me want to enter sauce mode again...