This super-easy ketchup (catsup) recipe with no HFCS is not only delicious, it puts you in control of how much sugar and sodium goes in.
With the ongoing battle against high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), people are beginning to realize just how ubiquitous it is - and recently the focus is on ketchup. Kids (and adults) can eat a lot of ketchup! And with that comes a surprising amount of HFCS. It's time to take action. This recipe kicks all corn syrup to the curb!
Use this recipe as a backdrop to create your own custom ketchup. You can use substitutes in place of all of the sugar sources for a diabetic-friendly version. Leave out the salt (and check the sodium content of your spices!) to keep down the sodium levels. Add cayenne or hot sauce to kick it up!
With the ongoing battle against high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), people are beginning to realize just how ubiquitous it is - and recently the focus is on ketchup. Kids (and adults) can eat a lot of ketchup! And with that comes a surprising amount of HFCS. It's time to take action. This recipe kicks all corn syrup to the curb!
Use this recipe as a backdrop to create your own custom ketchup. You can use substitutes in place of all of the sugar sources for a diabetic-friendly version. Leave out the salt (and check the sodium content of your spices!) to keep down the sodium levels. Add cayenne or hot sauce to kick it up!
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Signing UpStep 1: Ingredients
While fresh tomatoes stewing for hours may give you the ketchupy goodness you prefer, using tomato paste both speeds up the process, and gives you an option when tomatoes aren't in season. Of course, if you've still got loads of tomatoes that you canned last season, then you're all set!
My own personal recipe goes a little something like this:
(ok, it goes exactly like this)
I would guess this recipe makes about 16oz. Enough to fill the two vessels pictures in the intro.
My own personal recipe goes a little something like this:
(ok, it goes exactly like this)
- 2 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste
- 1/2 cup white vinegar
- 4 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon onion powder
- 1/4 teaspoon allspice
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon molasses
- 1 teaspoon agave nectar
- 2 1/2 cups water
I would guess this recipe makes about 16oz. Enough to fill the two vessels pictures in the intro.
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The government tightly regulates what is allowed to be called ketchup, and it must match a certain formula (for your own good of course), so they both should be high enough in acid, but keep your stuff in the fridge anyway unless you water-bath can the stuff by the proper method.
BTW, the ever reaching goverment made it impossible to market "walnut catsup" or "mushroom catsup" (or my fave, "bannana catsup") in these here united states. Very popular condments at one time.
Tomatoes are sweeter nowadays and borderline acidic enough, but the 1/2 cup of white vinegar pushed you over the edge to safe. http://www.pickyourown.org/tomato_acidity.php
google the following for lots of canning safe recipes: state extension ketchup
Most all of them start with raw tomatos, but you should be able to adapt one to suit. Changing around the spices should not matter.
I am however surprised as to all the atention Dr. Mercolla is getting (besides all the money) for atacking agave syrup. If you do your math youll find that you end up taking the same amount of fructose when using agave compared to using sugar, the only diference is that you practically eliminate glucose contents (this is what makes it healthy).
I will try your recipe from scratch using only agave syrup as sweetener making it true diabetic and diet friendly.
http://wwwDOThuffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/agave-this-sweetener-is-f_b_537936.html
turns out it far worse than HFCS. Go for coconut sugar .
High Fructose Corn Syrup.
The switch to corn syrup from cane sugar came about at the same time as three other significant events.
1. TV's - THE KING of passive activies.
2. Pres. Kennedy embargoing Cuba for Castro's nationalizing everything, including Hershey's cane sugar plantations (and Castro's own rather rich family's planation) and many others owned by US interests. Obviously the loss of Cuban cane sugar left a huge hole in the sugar supply to the US.
3. Electronic ignitions in cars. Why? Gas stations needed to regain the revenue lost when cars no longer needed to have the plugs and points changed, i.e. tune ups and the other maintenance issues that were found during those tune ups. Also, the tune up mechanic that filled up the tank and checked the oil became redundant, so no more full service. The replacement revenue was in the form of conveniently placed snacks at the cash counter. Convenience stores were born. A Coke and a Snickers while you're there vice staying in your car, far from temptation.
So the question is: Is it a correlation between obesity and High Fructose Corn Syrup, or is it just coincidence? Could it be that the obesity correlation actually involves these three events and not HFCS?
I do like killing two birds with two stones by using fruit juices (fructose? hmm, wiki it), honey, etc. as a substitute for whichever sugar and water sources one uses when home-making ketchup. I'm sure it'll taste far better to boot.
Cheers,
Fin
If any Presidential decision was critical in the use of Corn Syrup, it would have more likely been the embargo of Cuban Sugar by Kennedy. Huge hole in our sugar supply to fill.
'Bad for you' is relative. It's the quantities that are the dangers. By his charts, when we ate/drank less of it, we has less problems. But some of his charts are wrong as he presents them.
Your Doctor's second chart in the video proves that he is actually wrong about his own premise. You cannot have a balancing of weight gain + calories out = to calories intake, AND, have calories out = calories intake. His Coke example shows an excess of intake of calories and a cycle of getting you to drink more Coke, thus more calories. An excess intake of calories to calories out = weight gain. He doesn't show that the intake and output of calories are equal in his examples, thus he'd have proven weight gain from Fructose with a zero sum calorie equation. Which he hasn't.
Calories matter. Just because he's a Doctor, doesn't mean he's right. I can't speak about the chemistry, but I do doubt his physics relative to calories in v. calories out. Simply impossible. If your body turns the stuff into fat, your body burns off the fat when you go calorie deficit. If you don't eat enough calories for how many you're using, you lose weight. Yes, your metabolism may have slowed down, but that doesn't matter because it's about how many calories you used, not the rate of usage. You could be dead still all day, but if you ate less than the subsistence amount of calories, you'd lose weight.
As he has the physics wrong, it calls into question his chemistry. He may be dead right on that matter, but because of the physics, he's not 'academically rigorous'. Not a good way to present a scientific argument.
And I don't think you actually watched the vid. His issue is not with thermodynamics. And say all you want about physics, what cals you eat are important. And the part about academically rigorous is bs. He actually demonstrated that the way the liver metabolizes fructose. What is not "rigorous" about it? Did you not understand it? He's an expert on child obesity.
He's also an endocrinologist. He deals with hormones and the way they regulate the body. So metabolism is a huge deal. You say "your metabolism may have slowed down" but that's not the whole story. His story is how your liver turns fructose into some very bad chemicals in your body that you are not physically set up to deal with. He connects a number of studies together.
We didn't have these problems until after the 60's because until then, we worked. We didn't have riding mowers, or lawn services. We didn't have Segways. We didn't have cable, and if you heard the National Anthem you definitely needed to go to bed. We ate in the lunch room and not at our desks. We didn't have conveniences that allow us to sit on our duffs all day. (We had phone booths, and boy do I miss those!) We actually had to go outside. The wonder of it.
His video is a bit of a yawner for me, but I'll try again (he lost me early with his misrepresenting thermo 101). As I am a lazy American, it's easier to ask the rhetorical question than watch the video "So what happens if I do exercise and 'burn it off'?" Do those 'very bad chemicals' get converted into energy by our bodies, or do they just accumulate, or ?????
No, I didn't feed our son juice in the bottle when he was in diapers, but he did manage to weight 27lbs. at six months with Mom's Best and Her on a very healthy diet. He's still 99%ile for weight and height for his age (a Lake Wobegon'er as well). A curve buster for health studies.
I DO advocate a healthy diet. Eating right and exercising is the cornerstone of good health. A goal of mine is to drive away immediately after filling the car with gas. Coke is the biggest selling item in all major grocery stores. Finding protein in a convenience store is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Carbs keep, proteins don't. That's the core of the problem, isn't it?
1. lack of physical activity (I am guilty)
2. eating to much (portion sizes in the USA are HUGE compared to most of the world),
3. eating to much sugar of any kind (we eat many more pounds of sugar each year per person than most countries, even affluent ones).
I say all this, pointing fingers at myself at the same time.
This is an issue for those with corn allergies. It's also an issue for those who believe that corn-based products are way more ubiquitous than they should be. Although HFCS and cane sugar have roughly the same fructose/glucose ratio, we mammals seem to metabolize the HFCS differently than we do cane sugar. Some studies show more weight gain when metabolizing HFCS over cane sugar.
[Insert additional discussion/diatribe about corn subsidies and propping up the corn industry here]
See this for why fructose is the problem:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/sugar-may-be-bad-but-this_b_463655.html
Agave is much worse than HFCS on account of this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/agave-this-sweetener-is-f_b_537936.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jonny-bowden/debunking-the-blue-agave_b_450144.html
I'm no fan of the massive corn agribusiness industry, but from a health perspective, substituting agave nectar for HFCS doesn't do any good, because you're only increasing the fructose content--the primary obesity culprit you're supposed to reduce your intake of. It would be better to use plain sugar, or a blend of sugar and some natural sugar substitute that doesn't contain fructose, since sugar (sucrose) breaks down into one part glucose and one part fructose.
I'm not a paid HFCS shill. In the contrary, I fight that stuff wherever I can. But I am slowly getting really unhappy about the sloganeering and populist argumentations when it comes to things such as HFCS, MSG, soy based products, and more. Our diet is way too important to be governed by semi-informed slogans.
Of course the corn lobby does whatever they can to cloud the whole thing in their favor (n.b. the "you know what they say about HFCS" ads), as do interests and zealots in the inverse. We need to counter both, with science, with research, and with an active dismissal of anyone and everyone using slogans and talking points to try to influence our diets.
Fructose bad. HCFS bad.
Fructose is a big problem, and agave may indeed be "worse" than HFCS, but the cost difference between agave and HFCS (or any of the other options and subsidized corn-based sweeteners) means that the corporate food producers will always choose HFCS, the cheapest choice. That choice is kept artificially low-cost because of US government subsidies. That means we're all paying farmers to produce a product that would otherwise be a more costly and therefore inferior choice.
A great way to reduce intake of fructose is to allow the production costs be more realistic; let HFCS compete on an equal footing with other sweeteners. As long as HFCS remains as ridiculously cheap as it is, agribusiness will continue to raise corn over other less-subsidized crops. I'm not against subsidies, per se, I'm just frustrated by the "unintended consequences" of a subsidy program gone amok.
If corn and its by-products were more realistically priced, maybe another less fructose-laden sweetener would be more appealing to producers. Maybe if sweeteners were more expensive across the board the food industry would consider saving some money by reducing the quantities they use.
Fructose = bad, subsidized fructose = worse.
as I am sure you know, it is the fructose that makes HFCS so bad for you. I would use Plain White Sugar or just up the Brown sugar and eliminate the Agave altogether.