Pantry Staples

Ketchup

Ketchup's high acidity and sugar content are both genuine natural preservatives, which is why it stays safe well past the point its flavor starts to fade, even without refrigeration for many households.

Modern commercial ketchup, dominated by tomato-based versions, is a relatively recent standardization — earlier American ketchups included mushroom and walnut varieties, and the tomato version only became the dominant standard in the 20th century.

Its thick, slow-pouring consistency comes from xanthan gum or a similar stabilizer in most modern formulations, engineered specifically to resist flowing until enough force (a firm shake or squeeze) is applied.

Heinz became the dominant US ketchup brand in large part through founder Henry Heinz's early, aggressive push for purity and transparency at a time (the late 1800s) when many competing condiments used cheaper fillers and questionable preservatives — a reputation for trustworthy ingredients that became central to the brand's marketing for over a century.

Making tomato ketchup from scratch involves simmering tomatoes down for a long stretch to drive off water and concentrate flavor before straining out seeds and skins, a process that mirrors, on a smaller scale, how commercial tomato paste itself is made before sugar, vinegar, and spices are added to turn it into ketchup.

The upside-down squeeze bottle, now the standard in most US kitchens, only became widely adopted in the 1980s once manufacturers developed a cap seal reliable enough to prevent leaking — before that, the traditional glass bottle, notoriously slow to pour, was the default, prompting the once-common trick of loosening ketchup with a knife inserted down the side.

In much of the Commonwealth (the UK, Australia, and others), the same basic tomato condiment is more commonly called "tomato sauce" rather than ketchup, a labeling difference that can occasionally confuse an American recipe writer's instructions when read by a cook shopping a British supermarket.

Ketchup shows up as a base ingredient in more recipes than its condiment reputation suggests — cocktail sauce, a simple homemade BBQ sauce, and a quick glaze for meatloaf all start from a squeeze of ketchup mixed with a few other pantry staples, taking advantage of its concentrated tomato flavor and built-in sweetness and acidity.

Individual foil or plastic ketchup packets, a familiar sight at fast-food counters, are formulated slightly differently from a bottled version in some cases, since the smaller, single-use portion needs to survive being torn open by hand and squeezed out completely without the benefit of a resealable cap protecting the rest of a larger batch.

Some regional and specialty ketchups swap the standard tomato base for something else entirely — a banana ketchup, popular in the Philippines and developed originally during a World War II tomato shortage, uses banana as its main fruit base but is spiced and colored to closely resemble standard tomato ketchup in look and use.