2 Homemade Ketchup Recipes – Home Canned and Lacto-Fermented

My youngest loves ketchup.  I think he could almost live on salsa and ketchup, if I’d let him.  This year we’ve turned roughly 130 pounds of tomatoes into salsa, and around 60 pounds into ketchup.  When I make homemade ketchup, I generally use it as a means to use up all the odds and ends of tomatoes rolling around, such as excess cherry tomatoes or slicing tomatoes that have split.  I’ll put a pot on the back of the stove and keep measuring tomatoes into it over a day or two, slowly cooking them down while I’m working on other projects in the kitchen.  (You could also use a slow cooker.)  The taste of this recipe is similar to a popular national brand – no big range of added spices – but like most home processed products, the flavor is richer and deeper.  You can really taste the fresh tomatoes, onions and garlic.

The key ingredient to this homemade ketchup is patience.  To get a nice, thick ketchup without adding any thickeners, you need to cook it down slowly.  Early on, you can keep the heat a little higher and simply stir frequently, but as the sauce gets thicker, you need to keep the heat lower as it will be more prone to scorching and bubbling all over the place.  Because I wave my paste tomatoes for salsa, I usually use juicier tomatoes for this recipe and more of them.  Paste tomatoes will cut cooking time and you can use less of them.

Homemade Tomato Ketchup for Canning

Ingredients

Tomatoes – about 25 lbs paste tomatoes or 30 pounds mixed tomatoes (cherry tomatoes are fine)
1 cup onions, finely chopped
1 teaspoon salt (optional)
1 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup cane sugar (white or brown)
1 cup apple cider vinegar

Directions

Core and quarter tomatoes and place them in a heavy bottom pot (or pots) or slow cooker on low/medium heat, stirring frequently.  Cook until soft and run through a food strainer, food mill or chinois to remove seeds and skins, or cook down until volume is roughly half of original volume and then run through food strainer, food mill or chinois.  As I mentioned, I usually make this while working on other things, so I do my straining when time allows.

Continue cooking tomato puree until volume is roughly 1/4 of original volume.  Add remaining ingredients, cook until onion and garlic are soft.  Puree with hand blender or food strainer, or leave lumpy – your choice.  Cook on low until desired consistency is reached.

While the homemade ketchup is cooking down, prepare your canner, jars and lids.  Lids should be kept in warm (not boiling) water.  Water bath canner should be filled enough to cover your jars with two inches of water.  Jars should be sterilized and kept hot.  I run mine through the dishwasher.  Some people heat them in their canning water or in a warm oven.

Ladle into prepared jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Wipe jar rims and threads. Cover with two piece lids. Screw bands until finger tight.  (Air exits from above the food during processing to leave a vacuum behind, and the vacuum creates the final seal, not you.  Just FYI to those who are new to this.)  Process for 15 minutes in a water bath canner.  Turn off heat, remove canner lid, let sit five minutes.  Remove from canner and place on kitchen towel on counter top.  After jars are cool, check seals.  Refrigerate jars (if any) that did not seal and use them first.

If you’d like a smaller, quicker recipe that also packs a probiotic punch, check out this easy lacto-feremented homemade ketchup recipe from GNOWFGLINS.

Lacto-Fermented Homemade Ketchup

Recipe reprinted with permission from GNOWFGLINS

Ingredients

• 12 ounces organic tomato paste (no salt added)
• 1/4 + 1/8 cup water (5 tablespoons)
• 1/8 cup whey (or water)
• 2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon mustard powder (could probably use a prepared dijon mustard if you don’t have powder)
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon cloves
• 1/8 teaspoon allspice
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (I used larger grained salt.)
• 1/4-1/3 cup maple syrup or honey (You could even add a bit of molasses.)

Directions

In a medium sized bowl, whisk together all ingredients. Pour sauce into a storage container (such as a pint mason jar). Cover and leave at room temperature for two days. Move to the fridge.

Wardeh said she kept an unopened jar in the back of her fridge for 6 months.  An opened container would have a shorter shelf life. If you use water instead of whey, double the salt or use a non-whey culture (not both).  The whey referred to in the recipe would be obtained by straining live culture yogurt or milk kefir. If you don’t have whey, you can substitute sauerkraut juice from live kraut or other cultured vegetable juice, or kombucha.  This will change the flavor, so feel free to experiment and see which flavor you like best.

Did you know that our gut is often referred to as “our second brain”, and is a major part of our immune systems?  Instead of popping a probiotic pill, how about incorporating live culture (probiotic) foods into what we eat every day?  As you can see from the recipe above, it doesn’t have to be complicated.  In her book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fermenting Foods and her e-books and e-courses,  Wardeh and the GNOWFGLINS crew make fermenting easy and delicious.  I have yet to try a recipe of hers and have it taste nasty – honest!  She’s my go-to person when I have questions about this sort of thing.  If you’d like to learn more about her Lacto-Fermentation E-book, click here or on the image below.  If you purchase through my site, I receive a commission and you get a great product from people I trust.  Thank you!

Thank you for visiting, and don’t forget to Pin and Share. Please visit the Recipe page for more canning and live-culture food recipes.

It’s always super busy this time of year with harvest, but hopefully things will be slowing down soon. We’re digging potatoes and onions today and getting them ready for the root cellar.  The boys cleaned it all out this week, and even took the shelves outside to hose them off and bake them in the sun for a couple of days.  We’ll be having our annual open house on October 5th from 10 am until 4 pm, so be sure to stop by if you’re in the area.

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