Last Saturday, I started out my day of making sauces by making the base I was going to use for all the sauces… Homemade ketchup!  My friends think I’m nuts, and I may be, but I like knowing that what I make is the result of my efforts, from base ingredients.  Otherwise, why not just take KC Masterpiece and add some spices? (Some do, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it… I’m just more of a purist than that, I guess).

The ketchup is not at all hard to make; I used Steven Raichlen’s recipe from "BBQ USA", though I also want to try Paul Kirk’s recipe sometime soon.  Basically, I started by taking out the seeds of about 130 ozs. of canned whole, peeled tomatoes and putting those aside.  I sweated an onion with some garlic in a pan, then added in the tomatoes, sugar, spices and vinegar.  The worst part is getting the seeds out of the tomatoes.

I cooked the ketchup for a couple of hours, adding vinegar, sugar or tomato juice as I needed.  I also took an immersion blender to the whole thing while it simmered.  It got fairly smooth, but I think that next time, I’m going to try cooking the ketchup all day to see how smooth I can get it, or maybe try using tomato sauce, though that would change proportions a bit.

For the first sauce, as I planned in my Get Sauced blog, was an onion/balsamic vinegar sauce.  I sweated a red onion with some garlic, then added about half a cup of balsamic vinegar, 2 cups fo ketchup, 6 oz. of tomato paste, 1 cup of brown sugar, salt, pepper, tobasco sauce, cayenne, celery seed, and just a touch of liquid smoke.  I’ll post the actual recipes later in case anyone wants to try them.  After it cooked, I also used the immersion blender.

For the next sauce, I started with one cup of ketchup, 1 bottle (12 oz.) of Woodchuck Dark Amber Cider, 3/4 cup of cider vinegar, onion powder, garlic powder, sugar, cayenne, tobasco, salt, pepper and cinnamon.  I used powders because I didn’t want any chunks at all.

That last sauce was an espresso based sauce.  I started with 1 cup of ketchup again, 6 ozs of brewed expresso, sugar, molasses, cayenne, chipotle tobasco, worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, onion and garlic (at least that’s all I remember).  Again, I used powders for texture.

The results were as follows:

Sauce 1:  A bit too sweet, but good flavor.  A bit more heat at the end would help with the sweet.  It could also use maybe 1/4 cup more vinegar, but good, deep flavor.

Sauce 2: Nice bite to it with a fresh appley taste.  This would work well on chicken and ribs.  I might want to cut back to about half the cinammon and add some allspice, but a good sauce overall.

Sauce 3: Earthy, deep flavor from the espresso.  No really ‘coffee’ taste, which was what I expected.  Nice, low heat at the end.  I thought this was the best overall, though my wife liked the hard cider sauce better.

What I enjoyed about them was they weren’t recipes that I looked up and tweaked; the ketchup was a recipe, but everything else was from me.

If you haven’t taken some time to develop your own sauce, try some.  Start with recipes you like and start figuring out what makes a sauce (to me, it’s a balance of sweet and sour and acid, with heat undertones).

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