How to make ketchup from fresh tomatoes
Despite
getting hit by early
blight, septoria
leaf spot, and late blight, our tomatoes are still
plugging away. We've met our quota of spaghetti sauce and pizza
sauce frozen for the winter, have run out of days hot enough to dry
whole tomatoes, and
can only make two batches of harvest
catch-all soup per
week since I didn't plant enough parsley this spring. Time to
experiment with ketchup!
The internet is chock
full of ketchup recipes, so it took me a while to discover a recipe
that tasted a lot like the stuff in the grocery store's squeeze
bottles. (Yes, we have unsophisticated tastes when it comes to
ketchup.) The recipe that follows is quite mild, so you might
decide to increase the seasonings, or perhaps add some of the alternate
spices found in other recipes --- celery, cloves, hot peppers,
cinnamon, paprika, 
ground
mustard, etc. If you've developed your own ketchup recipe, please
tell me about it in the comments!
For my simple recipe,
you start with a medium-sized bowl full of ripe roma tomatoes.
Cut off the tops and any bad spots and blend in the food processor
until liquified. Pass the blended tomatoes through a foley mill
to remove seeds and skin. You should now have a large skillet
mostly full of thick tomato juice.
Next, remove the
exterior skins from 2 cloves of garlic and 1.5 large onions. Cut
into pieces small enough to fit into the food processor and blend until
liquified.
Add the blended garlic
and onions to the tomatoes, along with 3 tablespoons of apple cider
vinegar, 0.5 teaspoons of allspice, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 4.5
tablespoons of honey. 
Cook
on high heat, stirring as necessary, until the mixture resembles
ketchup --- about an hour.
Allow the ketchup to sit
in the fridge for a couple of hours before tasting it. Then make
some baked sweet and white potato fries and dig in!
This recipe makes about
2.75 cups of ketchup. Since you don't put in corn syrup and do
use all fresh vegetables, I tend to agree with Ronald Reagan and
consider it a vegetable (although a very small serving of one.)
Compared to storebought ketchup, this concoction has about half the
salt, two-thirds of the sugars, and a third again as many vitamins and
minerals.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I modified this recipe a bit: http://www.instructables.com/id/Ketchup-Catsup-Recipe/
I used white sugar instead of agave nectar (no agave in the house), and I did about 3/4 (of the amount given in the recipe) cider vinegar and 1/4 white vinegar. It came out pretty well, especially given that it's my first ketchup. I'll be fiddling with it more before too long. I rarely use tomato paste because there's a metallic taste to it that neither I nor my husband like, so I'll probably use tomato sauce, possibly pureed tomatoes. I'm also planning to use homegrown garlic and onions as they come in. Someday I hope to use homegrown tomatoes, but it sure won't be this year! I also want to find a way to make the ketchup I like, and then be able to can it so it doesn't have to take up space in the freezer.