A Quest for the Secret of Tomato Ketchup
Oh, that divine tomato ketchup. You dip your toasted sandwich in it, it’s indispensable at a barbecue, and on a hungover Sunday morning, you’re absolutely delighted to pour it over a plate of pasta with some leftover cheese.
Anyone who, on that hungover Sunday morning, decides—after asking a few existential questions—to take a closer look at the ingredients on a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup, will find a mysterious phrase: ‘extract of spices and herbs’. Ketchup is made from tomatoes, that much is obvious, but how does it actually work? Can you make it yourself in your own kitchen with a kilo of tomatoes and the right spice mix?
Those searching for the answer first end up in Elst, where the Heinz factory is located and where all the ketchup for Europe is made. But Dutch tomatoes aren’t exactly known for their rich flavor profile, are they?
They’re just like people
That’s right. Tomatoes are just like people. If they go without sun for a while, they become pale and feel a little weak. The tomatoes for Heinz therefore grow near the town of Badajoz in Extremadura, southern Spain, where the sun always shines. A friendly farmer offers the following hint, pointing to the tomatoes gleaming across the expansive fields: “these tomatoes.” What kind of super tomato is this?
Heinz itself reports that only five people in the entire world know the recipe
The Conesa processing plant, where the tomatoes are processed into tomato purée, is also located in Badajoz. This is the magical stuff that eventually becomes the ketchup’s main ingredient. A Conesa employee explains that a tomato specially cultivated for Heinz is used for the purée, and that it took thirty years to develop this tomato. It is a tomato with a lot of flesh and little moisture.
Enough about the tomato; back to the recipe. Thanks to that super tomato, you could almost forget about the spice mix. Heinz itself reports that only five people in the entire world know the recipe. “I don’t even know it myself,” says a Heinz communications employee. “The purée arrives at the factory; I can’t tell you any more.” She explains that, besides tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, and the spice mix, not even preservatives are added, thanks to the combination of sugar, vinegar, and salt.
The difficult part isn’t the flavor, but the viscosity
Could a chef filter out the ingredients?
“Of course I can,” says Manick Chowdhury, chef at Amsterdam eatery Tabac. “Heinz ketchup first of all contains the standard ingredients: tomato purée, salt, spices, vinegar, and sugar. I’ve tried to recreate Heinz before, but I never quite succeeded. The difficult part isn’t the flavor, but the viscosity.” According to him, the mysterious spice mix is “a spice blend of onion, garlic, paprika, celery, cinnamon, allspice, and pepper”.
Instead of trying to recreate tomato ketchup, you’d therefore be better off experimenting with recipes that use ketchup. For this ultimate toasted sandwich, for example.
Text: Presented By Heinz
