On Mon 12 Sep 2005 12:00:00p, ~patches~ wrote in rec.food.cooking:

> Someone mentioned there used to be a couple of different kinds of
> ketchup but now they could only find the Heinz style ketchup. I decided
> to make ketchup today. I have several recipes. I noticed that each
> recipe starts with tomato puree, chopped tomatoes, or tomato paste. I
> also noticed each recipe uses a portion of whole spices with the
> exception of one. The kinds of ground spices were fairly consistent
> for each recipe. This got me thinking that playing with the spices can
> vary the flavour somewhat. All the recipes had vinegar of some type in
> them so even altering the type of vinegar would change the flavour. All
> had some type of sugar so perhaps brown sugar would give a richer
> flavour? All the recipes were straight forward and would be easy to do.
> One recipe says it will keep for at least 8 months in the fridge. I
> would imagine with the sugar and vinegar content this would hold true
> for all of them. The nice thing about making your own is you can tinker
> with the flavour and the consistency. There is a basic recipe for
> ketchup at homecanning.com.
>
> I settled on one recipe then tweaked from there. You should smell my
> kitchen! This one is going to be a keeper. I'm planning on canning it
> up when it's finished reducing. Outside my backdoor a nice rosting pan
> full of tomato paste is reducing as well. So even outside smells like
> cooking tomatoes
>

I bet all of that really does smell good! Have you documented all the
tinkering you've done in the course of making this batch that smells so
good? I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to know what you ended up with.

--
Wayne Boatwright *¿*
____________________________________________

Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.
Sam Goldwyn, 1882-1974