Here, if in real bottles and bright plastic packages real ketchup was sold, without preservatives, containing only useful lycopene and pectin, juicy, with very different tastes! But no. As always, you have to look for sauce recipes, for self-preparation, to eliminate the content of sodium salts, artificial thickeners: after all, ketchup was invented in ancient China in order to improve food absorption, saturate the body with antioxidants, help it cope with harmful cholesterol excess, falling along with fried meat and fish. Well, well, let's not waste time in vain.
Basic technological principles for making homemade ketchup
Like ketchup, but prefer to use only natural products? With the onset of the “tomato season”, try to prepare as much tomato puree as possible, home-made, without starch and other thickeners. This is the basis of modern ketchup, of course, if it is real.
Tomato puree or pasta is prepared very simply and at home: you only need to pick or buy ripe tomatoes, chop in any available way, rub through a sieve, be patient, and slowly evaporate the liquid to the desired thickness. It is advisable to evaporate the tomatoes in a sealed container in order to preserve a maximum of vitamins, but even if they are lost, many useful substances and organic compounds will remain in the puree.
If you can not achieve the desired consistency, add fresh applesauce: in apples (especially in the skin) a lot of pectin, and these fruits are very harmoniously combined with tomatoes. No wonder tomatoes were once called apples, and modern breeders from Switzerland even managed to cross these fruits! In addition, apples can themselves be the basis of spicy ketchup, and these fruits will do an excellent job with the function of improving digestion. The basis of homemade ketchup can serve as berries and fruits: the sweet and sour taste is unusually combined with different types of meat, and the biochemical composition of gooseberries, plums, cherry plums, currants, quince, cranberries and cranberries are no worse than a tomato vitamin set. Only in the berry puree for cooking ketchup to meat and other main dishes do not add too much sugar, or eliminate it completely, if there is enough fructose in the berries. Too sweet berry puree is useful only for sauces for dessert.
It remains to add favorite spices and spices to the base for ketchup, preservatives that help increase the shelf life of the product - salt, sugar, vinegar. What spices need to add? Note that these are natural, not chemical additives, as is the case with the beautiful bottles in the store. Ask about the composition of your favorite ketchup, which is listed on the product label. So there is an idea for a favorite recipe! By the way, about containers for packing homemade ketchup there are such suggestions:
If it is not essential to preserve ketchup in small and beautiful bottles and only in summer, then preserve tomatoes and applesauce, without sugar: in the winter, it is very easy to make classic ketchup from such blanks. In this embodiment, you will not need a lot of small dishes, which occupies an area in the closet, and tomato puree can be preserved in more capacious cans of 0.5-1.0 l.
At any time from such a semifinished product can be prepared ketchup for five minutes. Moreover, in the case when long-term preservation and storage of the product is not required, you can expand the list of ingredients by adding products that are difficult to preserve at home: meat or fish broth, sour cream and other dairy products.
If you want to try the Chinese sauce with anchovies, which became the ancestor of ketchup English, and later - the business idea of American producers, then tomatoes in this case will not be needed. There are many recipes for soy-based ketchup. Do not forget that ketchup is a kind of sauce, and this is the most numerous group of additions to different dishes in world cuisine, consisting of a wide variety of products, since sauces are served not only to meat and fish, but also to vegetable dishes, pasta, and sweet desserts. . Sometimes the sauces are so tasty that they are eaten simply with bread. What else to add to what was said? No matter how many recipes are written on the Internet, every housewife, following the exact amount of ingredients specified in them, will still cook a completely new dish. If we talk about the recipe of any ketchup, then we must take into account that everyone has different tastes and is guided by their own organoleptic characteristics. It is important to have an idea of the composition of the dish, the order of cooking, and the number of ingredients is usually given in order to have a general idea of the consistency, the basic taste, which should be obtained as a result of your own culinary interpretation.
Try to reproduce the tastes of the most popular recipes that are in great demand in the trade network, or prepare the sauce according to old, almost forgotten recipes.
1. Homemade ketchup - a simple classic from tomatoes
Ingredients:
Tomato puree (humidity not more than 50%) 90%
Carnation
Sweet paprika
Chilli or cayenne pepper
Coriander, black and Jamaican pepper, cloves
Salt
Sugar
Vegetable oil, refined 10%
Table vinegar 12%
Cooking:
Choose the required amount of sauce, and to this value of the main component, tomato puree, add a tenth of the oil, and in the oil, previously calcined in a pan, add all the ground spices, according to your taste. Pour the oil into the boiling puree, then sweat for a few minutes: with a volume of 1 l sauce, five minutes of stewing is enough. Add hot vinegar to the hot ketchup, and immediately pour it into the prepared container. Dishes must be sterile, dry and hot. Work in an oven mitt to avoid getting burned.
When canning, vinegar never boil, otherwise it loses its properties: the alcohol contained in it instantly evaporates, and only acetic acid remains, and the alcohol just inhibits the development of harmful bacteria that damage preservation.
2. Homemade tomato ketchup with sweet pepper, garlic and onions
Ingredients:
Tomatoes, peppers, carrots and onions, onions - one by one;
Oil - 20% of the total mass of vegetables;
Sugar and salt, garlic, and a mixture of ground pepper, bay leaf and coriander - to taste
Cooking Method:
Wash tomatoes and peppers. Blanch the tomatoes in boiling water to remove the skin. Chop the peppers with a fork, put on a baking sheet and bake for about ten minutes in a well-heated oven. Then, too, remove the skin, when cool, remove the stalk and seeds. Shred carrots and onions, fry in butter until soft. Do not forget to add spices to the oil to enhance the flavor. You can fry onions and carrots separately, sprinkling them with a little sugar so that it absorbs the juice of the vegetables: in the end, this syrup will give the sauce a caramel flavor.
Punch tomatoes and peppers with a blender and reduce to half the volume. Add carrots and onions, blender again the whole mass, pass through a sieve to form a smooth homogeneous consistency. Now put the sauce on the stove, add salt, sugar, bay leaf, garlic and other spices. Check for taste. If desired, you can add spiciness, in the form of ground hot pepper. Remove the boiled bay leaves, and the boiling sauce, quickly spreading over the jars, twist the lids, wrap with something warm. When cool, clean in a cool place.
3. Homemade gooseberry ketchup, apples and ginger
Ingredients:
Gooseberry and apples - 1: 1
Ginger root, fresh
Sugar
Pepper Mix
Cilantro
Hot green pepper
Salt
Cooking:
Gooseberries and apples sort out. Cut the apples into slices and mince with the gooseberries. Add sugar and salt, slowly cook the mashed potatoes, like jam. 5-10 minutes before the end of cooking, add cilantro and spicy green pepper, crushed to a pasty state, and grated ginger. Cool the mass and rub through a sieve to remove the grains and the most prominent particles of fruit mash. Add ground spices to mashed potatoes, taste it. Boil the sauce again, no more than ten minutes, and pack in prepared jars. If you decide not to add hot peppers to ketchup, then just in case, pasteurize the jars. Hot pepper contains capsaicin, which is a natural preservative, so the sharpest seasonings can not be sterilized, but ensure that condensation does not form on the surface of the cans is an excellent medium for the growth of mold fungi. Therefore, after pasteurization, the banks must be turned over and slowly cooled.
4. Homemade ketchup from cherries to duck and pork
Ingredients:
Onion 1 part
Sugar
Cherry 2 pieces
Cinnamon
Ginger
Salt
Muscat
Oil 15% of the total mass
Badyan
Garlic
Cooking:
Sort the cherries. To remove the codling moth, hold it in acidic water to prepare a solution (20%). Remove the bones, chop the cherries and boil down to half the volume by adding ground ginger root, nutmeg, cinnamon and one or two star stars. Fry chopped onion until golden brown, lightly sprinkled with sugar, add chopped garlic to taste, a mixture of peppers. Onions shift to cherry puree, punch through a blender, carefully grinding the mass. Bring ketchup to a boil and place in jars.
5. Hungarian Homemade Ketchup
Ingredients:
Tomatoes 2 pieces
Plums “Ugorka” 1 part
Bulgarian pepper and onion - by? parts
Provencal greens (mixture)
Garlic
Sugar
Red hot pepper (powder)
Thyme
Marjoram
Oil, olive - 10-15% by weight
Acetic Essence 1%
Working order:
Grind the prepared ingredients to a pasty consistency using a blender or other kitchen appliances. Pour in the butter puree, add all the spices to taste, and cook to the consistency of thick cream. Put the finished ketchup in hot form in jars and, tightening the lids, turn them over and cover to cool.
6. Green Home Ketchup
Ingredients:
Spinach 2 pieces
Dill, cilantro, green basil and garlic - by? parts
Hot pepper, green -? total mass Lemons - to taste (zest and juice)
Walnuts (kernels)
Salt
Ginger
Oil (mustard or sesame) 50% by weight
Cooking:
Wash and dry the spinach and herbs. Remove the zest from the lemons and squeeze out the juice. To the sauce was not too hot, you can remove the seeds along with the stem. Ginger rub finely. Dry the kernels in a hot oven and chop with a knife or mince. Combine all the ingredients, punch with a blender, to give the sauce a uniform, ketchup-like consistency. Boil ketchup. After the start of the boil, cook for no more than five minutes. If the mass is liquid, add chopped nut kernels. Transfer the hot sauce to the jars, turn them over, after cooling down, put them in a dark place.
Homemade ketchup - useful tips and culinary tricks
There is such a secret in Asian cuisine: fresh ground spices are thrown into hot oil, heated, and then the main ingredients are fried in this dizzy aroma, and the dish turns into a temptation from which it is impossible to break away.
The fact is that Asians, as representatives of the ancient culture, have long discovered the secrets of essential oils. Vegetable oil absorbs any odors very well, especially when heated. Essential oil, which has a lighter molecular weight, quickly evaporates, dissipating in the air. Combining any vegetable oil, with a neutral taste and aroma, with spices, spicy roots and herbs, which include essential oils, it is easy to get fragrant oil.
In pharmacology, this method of preparing aromatic oils has been successfully used for a long time. Vegetable oil, prepared in this way, perfectly improves the taste of the dish, and for it, as a basis for essential oils, even coined a special term - “transport oil”. That is, the oil through which “transit” passes the aroma of pepper, coriander, ginger and other culinary supplements, serves as a conductor of taste. Enveloping the meat with a thin film, vegetable oil conveys the aroma of spices to the product, which is transferred to it. There is also a cold way of making fragrant oil, when dill, parsley, mint and other herbal ingredients with a pronounced aroma are placed in the purified vegetable oil, which indicates the presence of essential (light, volatile) compounds. Such additives are crushed to make the extraction process faster, then the oil is infused for a long time at room temperature, but without access to light, since light adversely affects the quality of the transport oil, reduces its shelf life, sediment, turbidity and bitterness appear in the oil.
The transport property of vegetable oil is successfully used in the canning of vegetables, as it detains the aroma of added spices in sauce and in other winter preparations. In addition, the oil film limits the access of oxygen to the tank, thereby preventing the development of pathogenic microorganisms.
