Рецепт Ready-in-a-Snap Low-Carb Ketchup (Vegan)
Ready-in-a-Snap Low-Carb Ketchup (Vegan)
Posted on February 18, 2014. Filed under: Sauces & Dressings | Tags: carbs under 5, dip, sauce, vegan |
Making sugar-free low-carb ketchup is unbelievably easy. Just combine all ingredients, mix well and you’re ready to dig in — or dip in! No cooking, no compromises, full taste, little carbs. The secret spice makes this ketchup piquant and tasty!
Nutrition information
Protein
Fat
Net carbs
kcal
In total:
- 6.5 g
- 0.8 g
- 21.4 g
- 119 kcal
- Per tablespoon:
- 0.3 g
- trace
- 0.9 g
- 5 kcal
- Tips for making the low-carb ketchup
We are talking about a super simple and easy recipe, absolutely no tricks needed in preparing this thing! Even the ketchup is ready in a snap, it’s a good idea to let it stand in the fridge for a couple of hours or even overnight so that all the flavors get deeper. The ketchup really tastes even better on the next day.
As you know, cayenne pepper — the secret spice here — is indeed spicy, so please be really careful with it especially if you are going to make the ketchup for kids. A really tiny pinch or actually a shake is enough. You can naturally increase the amount if you fancy fiery flavors. I do recommend to use a little bit cayenne anyway, the ketchup tastes a bit too bland without it.
But let’s check how to prepare this tasty sauce:
Here are all the ingredients. You can see that the tomato paste is very thick compared to the tomato sauce. Use only natural products which contain just tomato and maybe some salt. If you can get organic stuff, even better.
Then just combine all ingredients…
…and mix with spoon…
…until everything is very well mixed.
It’s as simple as that!
My low-carb ketchup experiments
Now when I think, the first ever low-carb ketchup experiment I made was from George Stella’s book Livin’ Low-Carb. I always thought you have to cook the ketchup but he just mixed everything in his ingenious recipe and that was it!
I liked the result. I didn’t use Splenda — which the recipe used — but powdered erythritol instead. That gave a bit of cool aftertaste which was somewhat prominent but very tolerable after all.
Somehow the tomato paste was overpowering tastewise. Actually, it also felt a little flaky and frictional on my tongue. Yes, I think those weird words describe the feeling best. The recipe as such was simple and great, but it just wasn’t perfect to my personal taste.
So, I needed to create something which would go better with my personal taste. I started tweaking the recipe.
After some heavy tweaking there wasn’t much left from the original recipe, just tomato sauce and tomato paste, and the quantities and ratios were completely different from those of the original recipe.
In my experiments I drastically reduced the amount of tomato paste to get rid of that weird taste and feeling it gave. I noticed that you need just a small amount of tomato paste to reach the ideal consistency and the right taste.
I also tested different spices. I thought white pepper would have been an ideal spice with ketchup, but I was completely wrong! I went through my whole pantry before I found the perfect seasoning: cayenne pepper.
To be honest, I checked in a grocery store the ingredient lists of several commercial sugar-laden ketchup bottles, and saw cayenne in some of them.
At home I added a pinch of cayenne to my bland and tasteless ketchup experiment and there it was! The perfect ketchup recipe had born. Now I must say a word of caution here: even my taste buds consider this as perfect ketchup, somebody else might disagree. Therefore I would be really glad if you leave your favorite ketchup recipe — or link to it — in the comment section below.
But back to my experiments. Ha, since I love experimenting with food and recipes I wanted to establish a web page called Elviira’s Experiments. However, a URL called www.elviirasexperiments.com would have looked too suspicious so I gave up the idea completely. But at least I would have had plenty of traffic there!
Sorry, now finally back to my ketchup experiments: The original recipe called for white vinegar. I also had used that in my first experiments. Then I thought that good old raw apple cider vinegar could be not only a healthier option, but also a less overpowering option. It was, I liked the result really much. ACV gave more versatile flavor in a less pungent way.
Tips for variation
You can naturally play with different spices. I love to make curry ketchup since that’s something what my husband and I could eat every day, but which you cannot get here in Finland. And if you could, it would be full of sugar, MSG, preservatives and other yucky stuff.
We do buy curry ketchup from Germany every time we visit there. Or we used to buy, since now I can whip up a batch of curry ketchup whenever we fancy some. The ingredients? Just use this recipe and add 1 1/2 teaspoons mild curry powder simultaneously with the other ingredients. You can omit the cayenne if you like. It’s as easy as that and I feel shame that I didn’t invent this healthier curry ketchup option before so that we had to eat years that commercial ketchup which is loaded with the yucky stuff.
If you are in an experimental mood, a pinch of ground organic cinnamon gives the ketchup a nice, warming and cozy touch. Highly recommended!
Next week I’m going to post a recipe for my favorite dish with this ketchup, which you actually see in these photos. It’s an extremely simple side dish, but I thought it deserves anyway a blog post of its own.
P.S. I’m quite busy with writing my cookbook now, so I keep these blog recipes really simple…
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