Have you tried banana ketchup yet? You have to taste it!
When I recently went on a culinary walk (in other words, swanning through the city while snacking and day-drinking on the way to all kinds of delicious bites), I came across this sauce for the first time. And just as we at FavorFlav often spring upright like a meerkat when discovering something new, I knew: more people needed to get to know this!
And although banana ketchup (because that’s what we’re talking about) isn’t a new invention, it was the first time I tasted this deliciously thick, gloopy sweet-and-sour sauce; in a perfect combination with fried chicken and fried bhaji (spicy Indian onion fritters). So bloody good! So we decided to dive into it…
Brilliant woman
At the beginning of the twentieth century, brilliant Filipina Maria Rosa graduated in both pharmaceutical and food chemistry from the University of Washington. She was able to put much of the knowledge she acquired into practice when she returned to the Philippines (among other things, she interned with fish canners in Alaska). One of the things she missed but found difficult to recreate because tomatoes had to be imported was ketchup. So she got to work with a fruit that was readily available locally: bananas.
She made the ketchup by mixing the bananas with a variety of spices and vinegar, plus a drop of red food coloring to make it resemble the expensive American stuff. Around 1942, her invention was first mass-produced, and banana ketchup is still immensely popular there. The flavor certainly resembles tomato ketchup, but it’s fuller and sweeter (and actually just a bit more interesting).
Demand it at your supermarket
So I sincerely hope it catches on here en masse and becomes widely available to everyone in the future! The wonderful Tjin’s Toko sells it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other large Asian tokos carry it too, or can order it. And otherwise: make it yourself! Here you’ll find a recipe for homemade banana ketchup from the American website The Spruce Eats, and if it’s as easy as making tomato ketchup yourself, we can certainly handle that, right? Incidentally, the ketchup only turns red if you add a drop of food coloring; naturally, it’s more brownish.
So delicious
You can use banana ketchup with anything you’d normally eat regular ketchup with, such as burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken snacks, kaastengels—you name it! In the Philippines, they also eat it with an eggplant dish that sounds incredibly delicious to me: tortang talong. To make it, you dip slices of eggplant in beaten eggs (seasoned with salt and pepper) and fry them in a layer of oil until golden brown. I want that! So I have something to do this weekend…
Also read:
- Ketchup is even more versatile than you think
- Ketchup, mustard, mayo: how to store them best
- Shit: we really have a serious banana problem
Source: Wikipedia, The Spruce Eats
