In normal years I make all my tomatoes into passata and guard it closely so that we can use it instead of commercial tinned tomatoes throughout the year. But this year is different. The huge numbers of tomatoes that I was able to buy cheaply last week mean that I can experiment with something different, namely.. ketchup.

The recipe I wanted to try out (from River Cottage) starts with a litre of roasted tomato passata, which I already have after the weekend’s activity. To that you add cider vinegar, lemon juice, pepper and various spices, plus some demerara sugar. I looked at the list of spices and decided to modify it a bit, I did use the suggested mustard powder, ground ginger and freshly ground pepper, but I omitted celery salt (Mr Snail does not like celery) and ground cloves (they make me think of toothache) and instead added some hot paprika.

In hot water

Because of the vinegar, this concoction will apparently keep for a couple of months if you simply put it in a jar, but I want to be sure that my stored produce will last a good long time, so I decided to immerse the jars in a hot water bath for 20 minutes just to be sure. We do eat commercially-produced tomato ketchup and I will be very interested to see how this compares, because if we like it, that would be another processed food that I could cross off my list… and, in fact, there aren’t very many of them left that I still buy.

I’m interested to know whether anyone else makes tomato ketchup and, if so, what spices you put in it.