I’ll definitely give it a go! I get a mountain of tomatoes in the CSA farm share every fall. Store bought ketchup is so meh! Ketchup in other countries is so much better...no corn syrup in that. Thank you for this video.

Hope you enjoy it. You can also make some alterations to the flavour profile if you like, what we used was very much the standard North American Tomato Ketchup flavour profile (plus the dried chili), but you can always experiment and try different things. Add a bit of star anise or a little bit of cumin. It starts to take on the character of a barbecue sauce, too.

If you need to use bottled sauce on fries or burgers, switch to salsa. Otherwise, make your own, even if you need to use canned tomatoes in winter.

As for the bottled ketchup, it's good for one thing. Yes, it does work, but I found more non dairy creamer is necessary to make it taste like more than red water:

It is extremely sweet, which appeals to the palette of a huge proportion of North America. But neither the hubby nor I have much of a sweet tooth, so we want to be able to taste the other things going on. The other method, where you steep the spices in the vinegar, does make for a slightly more consistent final product, but also turns the volume on the flavours down somewhat. We like this method because it allows for some variation, and also is like ketchup turned up to 11.

and set out to make my own tomato ketchup (there are other kinds of ketchup) and it ended up costing about $100 per bottle, factoring in how long I had to cook down the ingredients to get them to a reasonable consistency and the fact that it used up almost all my delicious tomatoes. If you can find Enrico's Organic to buy, I think you'll find it as good as any you can make at home, and (even at $5/bottle) lots cheaper. And unless you use a hell of a lot more ketchup than I do, you ought to be happy with Hunt's.

Sorry to be such a Debby Downer--obviously "homemade ketchup" is a sore point ( trigger, if you will) for me.

$100 a bottle? I mean, I paid about $6 for all of those tomatoes, the spices all together added up to another $2, maybe, and it was on the stove for a couple of hours, and yielded a quart and a pint plus a little leftover.

I'm estimating the cost because they were my own homegrown tomatoes, but it was definitely the most expensive condiment I've ever had! I hope your experience is a lot happier, but for me it was one of those "Well, I'll never do this again!" moments. The only other time I can remember is growing rows and rows of kidney beans to dry. I harvested them and ended up with less than a bushel of beans, which didn't taste any different at all from the ones I bought in the store. The beans were fun to shake out of their pods, but what a disappointing yield!

for some reason I have a huge container of celery salt that I got at the farmers market. I will never use it all so I'm not sure what I was thinking. But I have no celery seed. Don't use either of them enough to remember to buy it. Last recipe that needed it, I did what you did and used the celery salt.

This was interesting! Thanks for posting.

He made his own celery salt for the vegan Caesar we made at the restaurant, and he had a huge jar of it left over when the restaurant closed a few years ago. Not like celery salt ever goes bad, so we still have it around for occasions just like this! It works just fine in applications like this where you want that celery aroma and also some salt.