The Portly Chef

As you may know, lawyer-turned-food critic Jeffrey Steingarten is my personal hero. So when my wife bought me The Man Who Ate Everything for Christmas, I literally devoured it. The book gave me lots of new ideas for kitchen experiments, one of which involved ketchup.

In one chapter, Steingarten sampled over 30 varieties of ketchup, categorizing them as Better Than Heinz, Like Heinz, Not Quite Heinz, and Not Quite Ketchup. Few were Better Than Heinz, but two of those were homemade versions. Steingarten provided recipes for both — one was arguably the first American ketchup, from 1804, and the other was a Steingarten original, from 1992. I decided to try my hand at both.

Steingarten both provides the recipes, and then explains how he made the ketchup. In an attempt to be original, I only read the recipes. The 1804 recipe, in all of its vagueness, is as follows:

Take tomatas when ripe, and bake them in an oven, till they become perfectly soft, then scoop them out with a teaspoon, and rub the pulp through a sieve. To the pulp, put as much Chili vinegar as will bring it to proper thickness, with salt to taste. Add to each quart, half an ounce of garlic and one ounce of shalot, both sliced very thin. Boil during the space of a quarter of an hour, taking care to skim the mixture very well. Then strain, and take out the garlic and shalot . . .and let it stand a few days before it is corked up.

Wit this model of clarity, I began. Using 5 pounds of vine-ripened tomatoes, I baked them at 350 F until soft, approximately 55 minutes. Once baked, I let the tomatoes cool, peeled their skin, and rubbed their pulp through a very fine sieve. In the middle of Nebraska we couldn’t find Chili vinegar, so I took equal parts white vinegar and sweet peppers in its juices, mixing the two and allowing them to sit.

I added the vinegar mixture to the pulp and, forgot “the rule”: you can always add more, but you can’t take out what you’ve already added. I think I added too much vinegar, making the mixture more fluid than desirable. (I now see the proportion Steingarten used — I’m way off). I then added the shallot and garlic and boiled excessively, attempting to reach a thicker consistency, without luck.

I gave up, straining the mixture into a resulting 6 ounce jar. Having now sat for 2 days, the consistency is better, yet still not desirable. The color is more orange than red, but the smell is quite aromatic, blending well the garlic, vinegar, and fresh tomatoes.

Somewhat disheartened, I turned to Steingarten’s recipe, which I won’t reproduce in full. Making my own changes, I took 10 pounds of tomatoes, a mixture of smaller on-the-vine hydroponic tomatoes along with the larger, Big Boy hyrdoponic variety of tomatoes, roughly cut them, and placed them in a very large, heavy, pot.

Boil the tomatoes for approximately 10 minutes, until they give off their juices and the mixture comes to a boil. At that time, remove the tomatoes from the heat and drain them into a sauce pan of at least two quarts capacity. Reserve two quarts of the liquid in the sauce pan. Take the boiled tomatoes and press them through a very fine sieve, using the back of a wooden spoon to press the paste through. Take care to make sure these tomatoes are well drained and that none of the skin or seeds pass through the sieve. From my 10 pounds of tomatoes, I yielded approximately 1.5 quarts of paste.

I took the tomato liquid in the two quart pan and added one small head of garlic (medium chop), one large yellow onion (medium chop), 1 tablespoon whole cloves, 1/2 teaspoon mace, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated ginger, 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, 2 and 1/2 tablespoons salt, 1 cinnamon stick, and 1 tablespoon Telicherry (or similar) peppercorns.

Cook this mixture over medium high heat until reduced to 2 cups, which should have a syrupy texture. I strained this mixture and then added the liquid (remember: no more than two cups — I, again, added too much) into the tomato paste. Add 6 tablespoons of sugar, or Splenda worked for me, and simmer until reduced to a Heinz-like texture.

The taste test: It’s now Monday evening. The medium is a Carr’s Water Cracker. The 1804 ketchup has sat open since Saturday noon. We try it first. Spicy. Strong tastes of vinegar. After burn (whoa). “Like a Tabasco, bar-b-que, ketchup,” the Wife says. I like it. If we were to do it again, and follow the rule (You can add later, dummy), we’d be really close here.

Excited that the 1804 isn’t as toxic as we though, we happily move onto Steingarten’s 1992 recipe. “This is ketchup,” says the Wife. Without realizing what you really taste in a bottle of Heinz until you make it, you can sense the cinnamon (slightly), the nutmeg (pleasant), lots of cloves (I would actually decrease the amount of cloves), and a perfect marriage of all with the tomato. Success. I’m ecstatic.

I look forward to summer, when I can go down to the local Farmers’ Market in Lincoln and get the “real deal” of homegrown tomatoes. What a taste we’ll have then.

Try your own, and let me know what you find.