When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct

&gt; <i>A few years later, after a woman in Pennsylvania sent Heinz a dozen bottles of her homemade, tastier, better-looking, benzoate-free ketchup, they adopted her recipe, which was also sweet, vinegary, and thick.</i><p>So the person responsible for the taste of ketchup, a woman, is barely alluded to, and not even named?<p>I don&#x27;t think of myself as a feminist, but this is pushing it.

A &quot;fun&quot; fact about Heinz Ketchup, especially considering the brand&#x27;s history with the condiment, is that Osem, an Israeli food company, had successfully lobbied the regulator to prohibit Heinz from calling it&#x27;s ketchup ketchup, due to it &quot;not containing enough tomatoes&quot;.

Related to the death of other tomato ketchups; tomato was not the original dominant ketchup in the US. Mushroom ketchups predate tomato ketchup by a century.

I thought all ketchups were about the same, until a Polish friend brought some back with them (Pudliszki). I never knew ketchup could taste like actual tomatoes!

A related video on the topic that I found pretty interesting:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iWlqxGQXZx8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iWlqxGQXZx8</a><p>It goes over an older Ketchup recipe and gives some related history. If you like historical food recipes and&#x2F;or culinary history, you might want to check the channel out.

I hadn’t thought much about ketchup when my spouse brought home Heinz Organic Ketchup. I didn’t really think it would be any different, but it tasted awful! We ended up throwing it out after using it once or twice because it was just so different from what we were used to. A few years later they were out of the regular stuff at the local store, so we ended up with another version (also by Heinz) that uses Stevia instead of sugar. It is also disgusting.<p>I wouldn’t have thought of myself as any kind of ketchup purist or loyal to a brand or whatever, but I’ve become so accustomed to Heinz regular ketchup that even their other versions of the same brand taste wildly off to me.

Not quite twenty years ago, we happened to look into an old book of handwritten recipes belonging to my mother-in-law. On Labor Day weekend, we bought a big box of &quot;seconds&quot; tomatoes from a local farm stand, and spent the weekend cooking them down and making ketchup. We did the same the next summer; then we bought a fixer-upper house, and for some years had no lazy long weekends.<p>It was good ketchup, though our son (mid-teens) preferred the store-bought product. All it takes is time, which I suspect is at something of a premium among the HN crowd.

I remember seeing my mom add small quantities of ketchup in certain stews and other sauce-based dishes. To me, ketchup has the perfect balance of flavors and helps create umami. Even well-known chefs use it sparingly to improve their creations [1].<p>- [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;lifeandstyle&#x2F;2017&#x2F;aug&#x2F;20&#x2F;why-is-ketchup-so-delicious-science-answers-big-food-questions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;lifeandstyle&#x2F;2017&#x2F;aug&#x2F;20&#x2F;why-is-...</a>

This probably sounds silly but is marketing why tomato sauce is often in sachets rather than added to your burger directly?<p>To explain: in most parts of the world unless you say no sauce the burger will have sauce added as they make it.<p>I&#x27;ve found in the US they give you a dry burger and then more sachets than you need of sauce. Which you then take and add yourself.<p>It&#x27;s a minor weird difference. I find it an annoyance myself &#x27;why do I need to put my own sauce on, can&#x27;t they do it when they make it?&#x27;. I&#x27;ve always wondered why the US burger joints seem to consistently do it this way. The only thing I can guess is that they want to show you that it&#x27;s Heinz sauce.

I still can&#x27;t unserstand why would anyone prefer Heinz to anything else. It has almost no flavor except vinegar...<p>Don&#x27;t tell me you have nothing to chose from in the US?

&gt; &quot;Heinz stood at the forefront of food hygiene, so regulations would only help the company command high prices and maintain its reputation.&quot;<p>I assume he&#x27;s just saying it wouldn&#x27;t have hurt, since those regulations also helped prevent a ton of people from getting sick from the preservatives that were poisoning them. I see the &quot;regulations only ever benefit the big players in an industry&quot; argument so often that seeing a line like that in an article seems more ambiguous than was probably intended.

&gt; The first recorded recipe for a home-fermented tomato catsup was published in 1810, a descendant of British imitations of Asian “cat-sup,” or fermented fish sauce, that the British encountered on colonial voyages.<p>Do they mean kecap? Does this mean the similarity in name between ketchup and kecap is not a coincidence, but ketchup really started out as an imitation of the other. Must have been a hell of a journey, because today they are absolutely nothing alike.

It’s incredible to think that since the homemade catsups were home fermented they were rich in probiotics and digestive enzymes and naturally safe from food related pathogens. They were replaced with a product that, while safe is produced correctly, is more vulnerable to pathogens that are very deadly (c. botulinum). It really seems like a huge loss for public health.

In South Africa, the most popular brand is &quot;All Gold Tomato Sauce&quot;, to be fair I can&#x27;t reallly taste the difference, between a &#x27;boerrie&#x27;[0] with heinz or all-gold.<p>[0] South African word for a &quot;hot-dog&quot; but the sausage is actually real meat sausage (boerewors), the sausage itself is kinda unique and amazing as well.

[in the USA]<p>Here in Sweden, the most popular brand isn&#x27;t Heinz, but Felix.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.felix.se&#x2F;app&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;33&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;220209_Felix_Range-Ketchup_1200x750px-1200x750.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.felix.se&#x2F;app&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;33&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;220209_Fel...</a>

Pfft. You don&#x27;t know about:<p>(·)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hela.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;hela-at-home&#x2F;products&#x2F;product-finder&#x2F;product-settings&#x2F;Product&#x2F;show&#x2F;product-uid&#x2F;spice-ketchup-curry-extra-hot-800-ml&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hela.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;hela-at-home&#x2F;products&#x2F;product-finder&#x2F;...</a>

Also an interesting read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thesalt&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;15&#x2F;346794301&#x2F;language-of-food-reveals-mysteries-of-menu-words-and-ketchup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thesalt&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;15&#x2F;346794301&#x2F;la...</a>

Interesting read, but &#x27;extinct&#x27; is a strong word - here in the UK, most supermarkets sell their own brand of ketchup alongside Heinz one, but slightly cheaper. With the cost of living crisis, I would expect them to gain in market share soon.<p>(There are also &quot;artisan&quot; ketchups, but they&#x27;re a very niche product.)

Give me a hot sauce over ketchup or tomato sauce any day.<p>Sour, salty, chilli flavours and a good hit of heat.

No idea why (might be crunchy palette) but in New Zealand it’s near impossible to find ketchup in shelves. I’d say 95% if not more of supermarket is all tomato sauce, no ketchup in sight.

There are some other ketchups on the market. Stoke&#x27;s ketchup is available in supermarkets and is delicious and expensive and they have a few different flavours.<p>Very interesting article anyway!

you can make a ketchup from scratch pretty easily (if you already use some of the ingredients in your meal it wont add much to your cooking time):<p>1) put cut tomatoes in a small-mid sized bowl (add tomato paste if you want it more thick)<p>2) add salt&#x2F;pepper<p>3) add vinegar (choose accord to taste u want)<p>4) blend it or smash it

I&#x27;m still disappointed we can&#x27;t readily buy a pizza sauce in ketchup bottle form

IMHO, the tangy organic ketchup from Trader Joe&#x27;s is the best ketchup.

Extinct? Amazon lists lots of different ketchups.

Thankfully Mutti exists.