Banana ketchup in a Filipino-inspired direction

Ketchup without tomatoes

Ketchup need not start with tomatoes. In the Philippines, banana ketchup, also written banana catsup, is a bottled table sauce of its own, sweet at first and then hot. The US National Park Service says the food chemist Maria Ylagan Orosa developed it in the 1930s in response to expensive imported tomatoes and local growing conditions, and the National Nutrition Council lists it among her inventions. NutriAsia's UFC brand separately dates its banana catsup to 1969. These are retrospective accounts; none establishes a first formulation or who sold it first.

UFC describes its sauce as select bananas with fresh spices, for dipping, cooking and marinating, and publishes no proportions. A distributor's listing for the regular bottle names banana, water, sugar, vinegar, iodised salt, modified starch, onion, spices and garlic, with sodium benzoate and a yellow colour. Because no brand publishes its recipe, this page does not try to copy one. It takes the sweet-hot balance as its target and works out its own route there.

How banana becomes a condiment

Banana does the job tomato does in an ordinary ketchup: it supplies the body and most of the sweetness. Banana varieties differ and so does ripeness, and both change how sweet and how thick the sauce comes out, so the first batch is a test, and it is worth knowing which banana you are using before changing the 55 g of sugar. The rest of the formula pulls the fruit away from dessert. Ninety grams of white vinegar and 5 g of salt give the sour and salty frame of a condiment, 35 g of onion and 5 g of garlic lay a savoury base, and 2 to 8 g of fresh red chilli, chosen for its heat, provides the hot half of the pairing, with a trace of ginger and allspice behind it.

Everything is blended raw to a smooth puree before it is heated, so that banana, onion and chilli cook together as one sauce. The raw mixture weighs about 592 to 598 g depending on the chilli, and 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering takes it towards about 500 g. A thick fruit puree catches easily on the bottom of a pan, hence the heavy saucepan and careful stirring as it thickens. If it ends up too dense, water brings it back to a thick but pourable sauce.

Colour, and another home version

This formula uses no colouring, so expect the colour of cooked banana rather than a tomato red. Colouring would change only the look, and adding tomato paste would make a different sauce, a banana and tomato hybrid, which should be recorded as one.

A contemporary home recipe from Panlasang Pinoy takes a different route: 2 pounds of saba bananas boiled for 12 minutes, blended with onion, bell pepper and garlic, then cooked for 60 minutes with white vinegar, brown sugar, salt, chilli and spices and finished with brown and red colouring and sodium benzoate. The page's listed 100 ounces of water does not match its method, and it gives no storage guidance, so it is a record of one author's recipe rather than a preservation instruction. Its history section says Orosa also added red dye so the sauce would look like tomato ketchup.

Serving and keeping

Serve it cold as a table sauce wherever tomato ketchup would go, especially with fried and grilled food, and taste it with that food before changing the recipe. Cool it promptly in small clean containers, keep it at 4 °C or colder and use it within 48 hours, or freeze portions while fresh. The 48 hours borrows general leftovers advice and is not a measured shelf life for this formula. The formula has not been cooked and compared with a bottle of UFC, and it is not for room-temperature storage or home canning.