A bounty of tomatoes! This is a big deal on our farm. Being in the mountains, we have a pretty short growing season, and our previous two summers have been exceedingly brief and relatively chilly. To grow anything that needs lots of hot weather, we must start seeds in a greenhouse in late winter, carefully monitor the last frost date (used to be May 10th, but this appears to shifting toward June), tend the plants through the hot dry summer, and then hope for warm enough late summer temperatures to ripen the fruits. This year we are succeeding with tomatoes by the skin of our teeth – nothing was really ripe til the last week of August. But now, solidly within the autumn season, I’m gathering baskets every day. I finally get to try my hand at a condiment so classic it’s almost generic (but it doesn’t have to be) – ketchup!
Ketchup is one of our many condiments and side dishes with rich cultural histories. There are many varieties of the stuff, originally thought to be a fermented sort of fish and/or mushroom sauce brought to this continent by immigrants from Asia. The product that lingers on the modern table is a sorry imitation, consisting largely of corn sugars and food coloring. I’ve read about a few different ways to ferment and process tomatoes, and I’ve been waiting for enough fruits to try them.
soft tomato pulp is forced thru the sieve, while seeds, skins and fibourous parts are removed
The first step is reducing a lot of tomatoes down into a paste. I slowly stewed tomatoes until they were a very soft mush, then passed the slop through a food mill (a giant baby food machine) to eliminate skins and most seeds. The remaining smooth slop was cooked on warm side of my wood stove until a lot of the water evaporated – about two days. I put the pot in a not too hot oven a few times, this works well for evaporation but also tends to leave a charred ring of sauce on the sides of the pot.
filling the jar
Many ketchup recipes now call for additions of vinegar, but I wanted to try a lacto-fermented version from the cookbook Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon (if you buy one cookbook, let it be this one). She recommends adding a bit of whey (the watery, microbially rich part of separated raw milk), a slosh of fish sauce, some sugar, and spices. I put all of this in a half gallon jar, placed a lid on it but didn’t tighten it down all the way, and left it in a warm room for three days.
it's alive!
The bubbles that appeared on the side of the jar are little pockets of carbon dioxide that aerobic bacteria and yeast exhale, and are an excellent indication of a healthy colony of friendly microbes in our ketchup. The smell of this sauce is wonderfully tangy tomatoey, and the flavor is outstanding. Not terribly similar to the commerical stuff, much more complex and much less sweet. I’m hooked. I’ve always suspected that the ketchup I’ve been eating all my life is a bland substitute for something way more interesting, and this whole experience confirms that in a big way.
squeeze me
I repurposed (refilled, really) a bottle for every day dispensing, spruced up with a new label, of course. I carefully scraped excess sauce down the sides of the half gallon jar and poured a layer of ghee on the top of the sauce for longer term cool storage. Would like to make about three times this quantity next year. I have a feeling it’ll be gone in a blink.
Neat recipe. I’m into slow slow reductions these days. If you want the sweet sour flavor profile without sugar or vinegar, I’ve experimented with adding Kombucha. I can’t say weather my ketchup is fermented but the Kombucha is a good tasting addition and seems to help the sauce stay fresh longer.
Kombucha Ketchup!!!! I’m seriously excited to try that, when/if I can get my hands on some more tomatoes (maybe I’ll cheat and buy some paste). I’d say that the micro-organisms in the ‘Bucha would definitely ferment the sugar in the tomato paste, plus add some acid. That’s exactly the function of whey in the recipe I posted, and it makes perfect sense that the ‘Bucha acts as a pro-biotic preservative. Thanks for commenting!
Oh and – Slow slow reductions? How do you accomplish that?
My verdict on Kombucha as a long term ketchup preservative is a negative one. I think it would work fine for a small batch of something you intended to eat in the immediate future. I added a splash to the second half gallon of ketchup I made, and our sauce acquired a bitter alcoholic flavor over the months it sat waiting to be eaten. It had huge bubbles in it – a sign of yeast activity. Bacteria in the whey preserve the sauce without introducing yeast, and in the long term the taste remains pleasant and sour.