The chief objections to most of the catsups on the market are a lack of bright red color, and a more or less scorched taste. This may be due to a number of causes. The brownish color may be due to underripe tomatoes, or to tomatoes which were picked during a spell of cold, dark weather. It takes sunshine to give tomatoes a brilliant color, and when there is an absence of sunshine for a week or ten days many of the tomatoes will rot before they attain a bright red color. At such times during the season it is impossible to get a brilliant color, but if the packer will exercise as much control as he is able to over the picking, persuading the farmers to hold their tomatoes back just as long as possible, he will not have a great deal of such goods and he can get a fair color out of what he does get, out of these dull colored tomatoes. He should be careful not to mix brownish tinted catsup with the brilliant red goods. If he will keep similar shades of catsup in the same shipment he is not nearly as apt to have complaints as he will have if he mixes different colors. It is even more important that all the bottles in one case should be very nearly alike. A grocer who receives a case of catsup all of which is very slightly off in color will usually not complain unless it is decidedly off. If, however, off colored bottles are mixed in the same case with bottles of a brilliant red color, the poor colored goods suffer greatly by comparison, and then there is apt to be a complaint.
The other causes of poor colored catsup are scorching at some stage in the manufacturing process and too much cooking. By too much cooking is not only meant too long a cook at one time, but also too much cooking in the aggregate. For example, a packer receives tomatoes of good color and he cooks them into pulp, which requires a cook of thirty minutes. He packs the pulp in No. 10 cans and sterilizes it about forty minutes, and he has a good colored pulp, as it has only received two short cookings. He stores this pulp for several months, and then makes it into catsup. It is reheated, which is hard on the color, as heat applied to cold pulp for five minutes to bring it to a boil seems to hurt the color as much as a half hour added on to the cook after the pulp is hot. After reheating, it is cooked into catsup, which requires about thirty minutes, and after being bottled it is sterilized at a high temperature for about an hour, which makes the fourth cooking those tomatoes get. This is what is meant by too much cooking in the aggregate. Too long a cook at one time will, of course, also darken the product.
Scorching is more frequent with catsup made from pulp than with that made from fresh tomatoes. Much of the catsup made from pulp, although not actually scorched, has a very faint scorched flavor to it.
It is hard indeed to make catsup from pulp which tastes like the goods which is bottled from freshly run tomatoes. It falls behind in both color and flavor. One finds that color and flavor are very closely associated in catsup. A bright red catsup is practically always a fine flavored product, while a dull colored catsup with a brownish cast to it very frequently has a more or less unpleasant taste with the suggestion of being somewhat scorched.
Advantage of Direct Conversion of Tomatoes Into Catsup
Many catsup makers are doing away with winter packing almost altogether. They bottle at least 90% of their catsup direct from fresh tomatoes. Half of the remaining 10% is made from 50% fresh tomatoes and 50% pulp, the pulp being added about ten minutes before the cooking is completed. This fresh tomato and pulp mixture makes a much better flavored product than one can expect to get from straight pulp. Pulp can always be used in combination with fresh tomatoes at the beginning and at the close of the season when the tomato receipts are light.
Catsup made direct from tomatoes is not only of superior quality, but it can be manufactured at least 20c a dozen cheaper for the pint size than catsup made from canned pulp. In many cases the difference will run more than that. Packers who put up a general line of tomato products will do well to reserve their fresh tomatoes for catsup, and to use their pulp for bean sauce, spaghetti sauce, tomato soup, etc., all of which can be made better from pulp than one can make catsup from pulp.
Thickness
The thickness of catsups found on the market is fairly uniform, and there is rarely a cause for complaint on this score. When catsup is packed in cans, the thicker it is the better the buyer likes it as a rule; however with bottled goods excessive thickness is not a virtue but a cause of much annoyance to the consumer. It is better to have it just a shade too thin than too thick.