Most restaurants make their ketchup with canned tomato puree. You can’t start there and expect to get a prizewinning sauce. Equally, I can’t get behind any store shelf bottles of ketchup. They all have this metallic taste to them. It’s just funny how universally picky people are about their tomato sauces, myself included.
I think I have never been somewhere where they make their own ketchup. And I think there is a pretty good reason for that too: whoever orders ketchup is not going to expect something they made, will not have crazy standards and might even want the known taste of regular ketchup.
In all likelihood, you have. The restaurants I used to work at would refill name brand ketchup bottles with their own. The recipe is simple and cheap. Far cheaper than buying name brand, which meant better margins. When people said that it tasted off, you’d just look at the label, sigh, and say “oh, sorry about that. Let me get you a different one.” And then refill it and bring it back.
Maybe things have changed in recent years, but I doubt they’ve changed that much. Given all of the jokes about restaurants going out of business without illegal immigrants, legality still seems secondary to profitability
Most restaurants make their ketchup with canned tomato puree. You can’t start there and expect to get a prizewinning sauce. Equally, I can’t get behind any store shelf bottles of ketchup. They all have this metallic taste to them. It’s just funny how universally picky people are about their tomato sauces, myself included.
I think I have never been somewhere where they make their own ketchup. And I think there is a pretty good reason for that too: whoever orders ketchup is not going to expect something they made, will not have crazy standards and might even want the known taste of regular ketchup.
In all likelihood, you have. The restaurants I used to work at would refill name brand ketchup bottles with their own. The recipe is simple and cheap. Far cheaper than buying name brand, which meant better margins. When people said that it tasted off, you’d just look at the label, sigh, and say “oh, sorry about that. Let me get you a different one.” And then refill it and bring it back.
Hahaha… seriously, that would be illegal, breaking several laws. Nobody here does that, ketchup is way too cheap to risk such things.
Maybe things have changed in recent years, but I doubt they’ve changed that much. Given all of the jokes about restaurants going out of business without illegal immigrants, legality still seems secondary to profitability
Hm I can mostly speak for the EU. What I have seen is something like non-Nutella in a Nutella jar at a crepe booth in Thailand :D
Was it still a chocolate/nut paste? Or was it something sinister, like vegemite?
It was with cacao, but really badly done, like a bit of oil with cacao and sugar. Ugh.
That sounds like an atrocity, I’m so sorry. Take pride in wiping some small bit of it from the world.