Kavey Eats: condiment ketchup

Showing posts with label condiment ketchup. Show all posts

Sunday, 18 April 2010

Lipsmacking Tamarind Ketchup

My family call this sauce imli (tamarind) chutney. The word chutney comes from the Hindi chaatni which describes a tangy condiment that makes you lick your lips at it's flavour! Although the verb chaatna means to lick I think lipsmacking is the most appropriate translation in this case!

I refer to it as a ketchup or sauce because I've found that most people in the UK think of chutneys as condiments with chunks of fruit and vegetables in them rather than smooth sauces like this one.

Traditionally, it is used in chaat dishes - snacks which again make you want to lick your lips (and your fingers) clean of every last morsel! They are often sold as street food - though many families enjoy them at home too - and are usually hot, spicy, tangy and with a contrasting mix of textures.

The chaat dishes I'm most familiar with usually include a dough-based element such as gole-gappa (crisp puffed-up fried breads) or maybe something like vadas (lentil dumplings) plus natural yoghurt, tamarind chutney (or ketchup, as I'm calling it), a combination of spices and herbs and perhaps also some boiled potatoes, chickpeas, salad items and green mango coriander chutney. I like for there to be something crunchy in the mix against the softer potatos and chickpeas, myself.

Oh and my parents also like an accompaniment called jal-jeera (fire-water) which I reckon is an acquired taste and one I'll never acquire!

Recipes for all these dishes can be found on our family recipe website, Mamta's Kitchen. (Mamta is my mum).

But the sweet sour spicy flavour of tamarind ketchup should not be restricted to such a small niche - I also like it as an alternative to regular tomato ketchup with anything from burgers and chops to chicken fritters and if you mix it with yoghurt it makes a lovely dip!

Mamta's Kitchen Tamarind Ketchup

Ingredients
400 gram packet of dry tamarind pulp, with stones/skins intact
Approximately 1 litre hot water
1 teaspoon cooking oil
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
A large pinch of asafoetida powder
6-7 teaspoons salt. *
100 grams jaggery or brown sugar or muscovado sugar *
1 teaspoon chilli powder *
2 teaspoons roasted cumin powder
1-2 teaspoons garam masala

*The quantity of these ingredients should be adjusted during cooking, according to taste. The tarter the tamarind, the more salt and sugar it will need.

Method

Dried tamarind block, broken into pieces

Break the tamarind block up as best you can and soak in hot water for an hour or longer. This will soften up the dry tamarind. It should be squishy.

Massage the pulp to help separate seeds and skins. I follow my mum's advice to wear rubber gloves as tamarind is quite acidic.

As I'm making a large quantity here I'm doing the mashing and squeezing while a friend is pushing the resulting liquid through a sieve to remove any rough bits

Mash and squeeze the pulp to release a thick liquid of the flesh and water. Mum usually uses a colander or sieve to squeeze the pulp against for this step however the most recent time I made the ketchup, I was at a friends and found her steaming set a great help - a large pan with small colander-sized holes in the base that fits snugly on top of a large saucepan - much more stable than mashing into a colander or sieve balanced in a pan or bowl!

More mashing and squeezing

Depending on how well you've extracted flesh from the seeds and skins, you might want to re-soak the remnants in a smaller volume of hot water and make a second pass of mashing and squeezing. I do usually do this.

You should end up with a large quantity of thick liquid.

Sieving the liquid to remove any remaining bits of skin and fibre

If you used a colander for the previous step, you may wish to strain the liquid through a sieve to get rid of any remaining lumps of skin or seed but if the liquid looks smooth and lump-free, don't bother.

Discard seeds and skin

Discard the seeds, skins etc.

In a large pan heat the oil.

Add the cumin seeds and asafoetida powder. When the seeds splutter, pour in the tamarind liquid and all the other ingredients except the garam masala.

Allow it to boil briskly, stirring from time to time.

Taste and adjust salt, jaggery/sugar and chillies to reach your preferred balance of sweetness, acidity and heat.

If the liquid is too thin continue to heat to reduce volume and thicken up. Note, this ketchup is not intended to be really thick and gloopy but of a pouring consistency.

Add garam masala and stir in.

Take off the heat and allow to cool.

Bottled

Pour into sterilised, airtight bottles or jam jars.

The ketchup will last well in the fridge for a few months. Jars can also be kept in a freezer, indefinitely.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Spicy Green Tomato Ketchup

We've been growing veg in our back garden for several years, increasing the varieties and volumes each year. In 2009 we ended up with an unexpectedly large number of tomato plants. Tomato plants which need sun to ripen. In a summer which didn't really give us much sun. At all!

Having had such lovely feedback on the first batch of spicy tomato ketchup I made back in July (to my grandfather's recipe, for sale on my one-off Covent Garden stall) I figured it would be even better (psychologically, if not taste-wise) if I made it with tomatoes grown by our own fair hands!

I didn't take any photos of the two batches I made in September, one red and one green.

But I made another really large batch with the several kilos of green tomatoes I finally accepted were never going to ripen and harvested in early October.

For some reason I forgot to blog it, but as I just found the photos and really like the recipe, I decided late is better than never!

I think I worked a little too hard when mashing the tomato through the sieve as the ketchup ended up with tiny but visible fragments of tomato seeds through it. These don't spoil the taste, or even the texture, on eating, but make it look less visually appealing than the two earlier batches.

The actual colour is greener, but I've messed up the white balance on these and didn't
manage to correct it properly when processing the images. Sorry!

The recipe I followed is my grandfather's one for spicy tomato ketchup, on Mamta's Kitchen. This recipe uses ripe red tomatoes. For green tomato ketchup, omit the optional red peppers and add extra sugar, to taste.

Thursday, 23 July 2009

Chutney, Pickle, Jam, Jelly, Marmalade, Ketchup!

Some of you may know I've been working on produce for my day manning a stall of my own on the Real Food Market at Covent Garden (27th August).

These pictures are just a small selection from two marathon sessions up at my parents' house in Luton. Thank goodness for my mum and my cousin, who shared the heavy workload!