A'udhu billahi mina sh-shaytaanir-rajeem! Bismillah...

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

We can cook - Tomato Ketchup

Inspired by Foz, I thought it's a good idea to share a new recipe we tried at home this week. We had an awesome road trip to Kerala and on the way back we piled up our car with lots of fruits and veggies bought from local farmers. We had bought 2 KGs of country tomatoes for just Rs. 10. Two kilos of tomatoes were too huge for a small family like us and that's why I gave a try with some homemade ketchups.


Liya loves tomato ketchup and she can eat almost everything with ketchup. I don't encourage this because I have a feeling that most bottled things have good amount of preservatives and chemicals added in. That's where we had a need to experiment on this.

Ingredients: 

Ripe tomatoes - 1.5 kg
Sugar - 3/4 cup
Vinegar - 3/4 teaspoon
Cinnamon - a small piece
Cloves - 3-4
Cardamom - 3-4
Pepper powder- 3/4 teaspoon
Paprika Powder - 1 teaspoon
Salt - as required
Sodium benzoate - 1/4 teaspoon

Sodium benzoate is a preservative and I gave some basic googling and found that it's not harmful. However, I added just a pinch to the recipe (not as much mentioned). I think, next time I will remove it completely and refrigerate the ketchup. 

Method:

Cut tomatoes into pieces, add in vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, paprika and pepper powder. Cook the mix very well. Let it cool down and put it in a blender and blend to a fine paste. Strain the paste to remove any pieces or remnants. Add in sugar to the paste and cook again until it thickens to the desired consistency. At this point you can add some food color. However, I usually stay away from any artificial food colors in my cooking. So, did not add in. Added extra paprika powder which gave a nice color to my ketchup. Once it cools down, add the preservative, mix well and transfer to a clean bottle.

* Note: If you don't like the taste of spices, you can either avoid them completely or reduce the quantity. Since we are making it into a paste, the taste stays strongly and I think I added cinnamon little extra. Next time, I am going to cut it down. In Sha Allah!

* The recipe makes nearly 700 -800 ml of ketchup.


Recipe courtesy - Lakshmi Nair

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3 comments:

  1. Superb... I havent seen my daughter loving ketchup so far as she is too young. But once she grows up I would love to try this as its anyways much much better than the preservative bottled ones. Will make this for sure :)

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  2. Oh I have never thought to make my own tomato ketchup! Will have to give this a go. Thanks for linking up x

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great idea to make our own. JD will love this idea. We shall get on the case :)

    Thanks for joining in with #recipeoftheweek - I've pinned and tweeted this recipe :) There's a fresh linky live at the moment, so do please pop over if you haven't already!

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