Chef's Ketchup Recipe

August 14, 2026

First, I owe an apology to everyone who has been asking me for this recipe.

I wasn’t trying to guard it like some great family secret. The problem was that in my restaurant, I made ketchup in batches large enough to fill a bathtub. Giving you the original recipe would have left you with 10 or 20 gallons at home, and unless you’re opening a burger stand, that’s probably more ketchup than anyone needs.

It took me a while to scale it down without ruining it.

I’ve always been fascinated by how things are made. Even as a kid, I would read ingredient labels and think, “I can make that.” My first real experiment was pickles. I was about eight years old, looked at the ingredients on the jar, found most of them in the kitchen, and started mixing. Somehow, those became essentially the same pickles I later made and sold in my restaurant for years. So apparently, eight-year-old me knew what he was doing.

Ketchup came later.

I remember when manufacturers started replacing real sugar with high-fructose corn syrup and adding ingredients that sounded less like food and more like something used to clean an engine, or a science experiment gone wrong. That was enough for me. I decided to make my own.

Once I opened my restaurant, making things from scratch became an obsession. We made hot dogs, sausages, mustard, aioli, pickles, and, of course, ketchup. And we sold a lot of it.
The difference is that homemade ketchup actually tastes like tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, and spices. It has real depth, a little tang, and none of that overly sweet, processed flavor.

So, after far too long, here it is: my ketchup recipe, finally reduced to a batch that won’t require industrial storage. I hope you make it and enjoy it.