Homemade tomato ketchup: nothing dollops like it

Certain things just taste better alongside a trail of ripe, red ketchup. For the most part, that well-known bottle does a good job too, but, with English tomato season now in full swing, finding good fruit is easy. Just last week, the local veg shop's striped boxes, piled high with tomatoes, caught my eye. They were a bit too good for ketchup, but I asked at the counter about getting my hands on a box of seconds – tomatoes past their best. Two days later I've a 5kg box of big fat, fragrant and very juicy red tomatoes, for a ridiculous £4.

Quite apart from tasting better, making your own ketchup is incredibly cheap – it's also terribly easy (my recipe was handed down from my husband's elderly Kiwi aunt), and dolloping your own sauce come teatime is brilliant. Both my kids loved spooning it from the jar, declaring it the best they've ever tasted (though perhaps this is because I let them have more, so chuffed were they with our endeavours).

We decanted the ketchup into empty clean beer bottles and handed samples out to the parents at school. Feedback the next morning? "It tastes just like the normal one." Praise if ever there was.

Homemade tomato ketchup

(makes about 2½ litres)
3.3kg ripe 'seconds' tomatoes – roughly chopped
1 onion roughly diced
1 head of garlic – peeled and roughly chopped with any of the green shoot removed
110g salt
900g sugar
600ml red wine vinegar
½tsp cayenne pepper or chilli flakes
1 generous tsp whole cloves
½ a nutmeg – grated (added at the end)

Put all the ingredients, apart from the nutmeg, into a large pan and simmer for about three hours.

Take care to stir often so it doesn't catch and burn on the bottom.

Leave to cool slightly before putting the sauce through a food mouli (or use a food processor and then sieve) and then add the nutmeg.

The ketchup is best stored in small stoppered bottles or small kilner jars that have been sterilised. Sealed correctly, these will keep fine in a cool dark cupboard as you would store jams and chutneys.

Once opened, the individual bottles should be stored in the fridge. It will keep well for up to a month.