Canning Homemade Ketchup

For the July version of the “Food in Jars” challenge, the category was Hot Pack Preserving. We don’t have air conditioning in our home, and our garden had a late start this year due to the crazy weather in southwest Minnesota. So, at 10:42 pm on July 31, I’m cutting it close here with the deadline.

However, I didn’t want to just make something to make something, and I was holding out for something to be ready from the garden.  That didn’t happen, and we were about out of our homemade ketchup anyway. So, ketchup it was!

I confess: I make my homemade ketchup with crushed tomatoes from the grocery store. Tonight, I used 4 26-ounce cans of the “Happy Harvest” crushed tomatoes from Aldi, and 1 14.5-ounce can of “Hunt’s” diced tomatoes.

The crushed tomatoes are perfect. The diced tomatoes have seeds, so I was glad I only was using one can of those.

The total amount of tomatoes I used was equal to 1 gallon, and I used 2.5 cups of vinegar. I ended up with 8 pints!

A Bit about Adjusting Recipes

I use a slightly adapted recipe from an old Ball Canning version. Here is their current tested and approved recipe.

For safety reasons, it is important to follow canning recipes closely. However, I know how to do the math and look at one safe recipe and its ingredients and adjust another recipe accordingly to suit our tastes – all while making sure it’s still safe.  I don’t do it often – but in the case of how I make my ketchup – I do it slightly.

The other ingredients I use in my ketchup include sugar, diced onion, celery seed, mustard seed, kosher salt, white pepper, paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder.  It is a perfectly safe recipe with plenty of vinegar to the ratio of tomatoes, not to mention the canned tomatoes from the store already have citric acid in them.

Anyway – I brought the tomatoes, onion, and spices to a boil for about 30 minutes, then I hit it with my Cuisinart Immersion Blender to grind all of the onion pieces up and blend it.

Then, I added the vinegar and cooked it on a low simmer for about an hour.  Last time I made ketchup, it didn’t get thick enough. This time, I wanted to make sure and cook it long enough for it to thicken properly.

Once it was thick and I had my jars sterilized and my hot water bath ready to go, I filled eight 1-pint jars and put them in the boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

Salt-Preserved Limes

While I was waiting for them to process, I quartered 2 pounds of limes and got them salt preserving in a wide mouth quart jar.  I first did this with key limes in February for the Salt Preserving challenge and we loved them in margaritas and on fish tacos, and we ate them all and needed more!

I love them so much I did a whole separate blog post about them here.  Yum!

Have you ever had salt-preserved limes? How about homemade ketchup? Tell us about it in the comments below!