I like ketchup. I eat it with a meat pie or on a burger or with my fries. When I was served this tomato chilli jam recently I instantly thought, “give me ketchup.” I’m quite grateful that I didn’t say what I was thinking because it was really good. It was tomatoey but it also had lots of other grown-up flavors too.
The tomato sauce (it seems silly to call it jam if you can’t put it on toast) was made at a cooking class I go to quite often. It was so good I was in a queue to get a copy of her recipe. I’ve never EVER queued for a recipe but this one was worth it.
We’ve all made a tomato sauce and it was so watery that it took forever to cook down. This recipe calls for a plum type tomato and you slice them in half and roast them til nearly all the water is gone. Then in the pot and cook away. In all honesty, I think you could make this from tinned tomatoes and it would be equally good but you’d need to cook it longer to thicken.
The recipe didn’t call for skinning the tomatoes but I don’t enjoy biting into a rolled up piece of tomato skin so once the tomatoes were roasted and cooled, I slipped the skins off and tossed them in to the mouli to get that last bit of goodness squeezed through.
Then it’s the chillis in the mortar along with the garlic other ingredients and mash and pound until it’s all well “pasted” and then combine them with the tomatoes in a large pot.
It takes over 1 1/2 hours to cook this down but only an occasional stir so you have plenty of time to do other things while this cooks. The kitchen will smell fantastic with all that garlic and chilli.
I made the mistake of telling John that as soon as I finished this off I was going to take Charlie for a walk. Now Charlie understands English pretty well but not well enough to understand, “when I’m done, we’ll go.” This look followed my every step until we went for walkies.
Those eyes kept saying, “Walkies now???” or “Walkies NOW???” He did get to go for his walk and he peed on everything that was sitting still.
I took this photo at the class with my tablet and used it here because I didn’t take a photo of the pot.
- 1.8 kg or 4 lbs plum tomatoes
- 4 long red chillies chopped - with or without seeds depending upon how hot you want it
- 2 long green chillies chopped
- 10 cloves of garlic (can be less if you don't like a lot of garlic)
- 1 tbs yellow mustard seeds
- 1 thumb of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
- ½ cup fish sauce
- ¾ cup sugar
- ¾ cup red wine vinegar (I used red wine liqueur vinegar - it was sweeter)
- 1 tsp sea salt
- Slice tomatoes and place on baking sheet and place in oven at 170C/375F for 45 minutes to an hour, set aside to cool.
- Place chillies, garlic, salt, ginger and mustard seeds in a mortar and bash with a pestle. Add a little fish sauce and continue bashing adding more fish sauce til it's well incorporated.
- Place in a large pot and cook on medium heat for 3 minutes.
- Add in the tomatoes and the vinegar