Ketchup Is Good, Actually

This week we’re finally uncorking the real heaters, with a bugbear that has frustrated me for years, my personal “vanilla is a flavor”: ketchup is good, actually. In fact, not just good, ketchup is interesting. If I ever catch one of you saying, even thinking that ketchup is “boring” or “plain”, then you need to stop and actually taste ketchup and think about it.

I know what you’re saying, you’re saying “But Andrew, I know what ketchup tastes like, it’s just a sweet tomato sauce”

Wrong! Taste it again! I’ll wait!

Ketchup is not, primarily, a sweet sauce. Ketchup is a sour sauce. Ketchup is a vinegar sauce, not a tomato and sugar sauce. If you made tomato jam, it’d still be pretty good, but it wouldn’t be ketchup.

I’d argue sweet isn’t even the #2 thing that ketchup brings to the table: after being sour (from the vinegar and, to a lesser extent, the tomato) it’s an umami sauce. Tomatoes are one of the strongest sources of glutamic acid, and ketchup is usually made from tomato paste, a concentrated form of tomato puree that really amps up the glutamic acid concentration. And on top of that most ketchup recipes will feature garlic or onion powder, additional glutamate sources.

And yes, ketchup does have sugar (both from the tomato and usually extra added) but that’s not a knock! You need the sugar to both balance out and amp up the sour and umami elements; if you’ve ever had a flat tasting and boring cocktail, you can often bring it to life with a bar spoon of simple syrup. So too with ketchup!

I posit the primary reason everyone thinks of ketchup as boring is just familiarity. If you gave ketchup to a 1800s Londoner who was literally, not a bit, primarily eating unsalted bread with occasional milk as their main meal, they would lose their fucking minds. Much like how Coca-Cola is as complex a flavor as just about any Italian Amaro you can find and yet is “just what Coke tastes like”, ketchup is no less interesting than any other sauce.

I also though do think that among some circles of the “🤣 white people food, amirite😂” online crowd disdain ketchup not just for its association with the American hegemony (which, that’s fine actually, I can’t disagree with that lol) but also because it is (conceived of as) sweet and it is not spicy.

Aforementioned quibbles aside where it should be considered sour > savory > sweet, I can’t argue against the fact it contains added sugars and does present sweet in part, and definitely can’t argue against “it’s not spicy.” But spicy is not inherently more “interesting”!!! It’s just different!!!

From the reverse, let’s compare to gochujang, the Korean red-chili-paste sauce. Unquestionably it is spicy, there’s umami, there’s often an earthiness to it, and certainly not directly familiar to the palette of the American hegemon!1

But it is also very sweet. In fact, comparing the gochujang in my fridge to bog-standard Heinz ketchup, I get 2g of sugar per teaspoon of gochujang to 4g of sugar per tablespoon of ketchup. 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon gives you 6g to 4g like for like, or 50% more sugar in the gochujang! Even conceding the argument that sweet is boring (which you shouldn’t) look at the stats!!!!

This is not in the slightest to say that gochujang is bad or whatever!!! You absolutely should try things that are outside of your traditional palette, and try them with an open mind!! And it is also completely fair to be excited by things that are different for the fact that they are different!!

But my humble plea is to consider the experience of walking down a street you’re familiar with but stopping to actually listen to the sounds and notice the details of the architecture. Almost always if you do that you will be surprised by at least something you’ve never noticed before.

So too with the “boring” foods! Even something as small as noticing that ketchup’s primary taste is “sour”!