No Sugar or Stevia Homemade Ketchup

When I first learned that store-bought ketchup contains sugar, I about fell over! (There’s added sugar in some of the craziest things!) When I started making Trim Healthy Mama recipes, I was happy to see a recipe for homemade ketchup, but I’m not a fan of stevia, and the THM version contained stevia in some form or another. I do use stevia on occasion, but as I explained in my post on doing Trim Healthy Mama Without Stevia, it doesn’t agree with me much, and whenever I can avoid it, I do.

Read all of my No Stevia posts >>

That led me to try their recipe without the stevia, and I was pleasantly surprised that there was no need for the sweetness. The tomato paste was plenty sweet for my taste, especially when paired with other foods or added to my favorite Big Mac Salad.

This ketchup doesn’t take a lot of ingredients, and nothing weird or “out there” to make it taste good!

My 5 year can even mix it up for me!  {Thanks, kiddo!}

I am still winning several of my kids over to it, but I actually just added some to the ketchup bottle when it got down toward the bottom, and explained that we were going to work at reducing the sugar in the house, so it was either this or I start rationing the ketchup.

Here is where you can insert my older kids misquoting the movie The Martian – “It’s been 7 days since mom quit buying ketchup…” *sigh*

Please note, you have to start teaching your tastebuds to not *need* so much sweet.  You can retrain yourself, but it takes time.  Keep trying!  If need be, make this recipe with just a little bit of sweet, and start weaning yourself off of the sweet, and start enjoying the tang and spice instead!

I do have to make this recipe in bulk because it’s not just me eating the ketchup, and I have a rather large family, so you may want to cut this recipe down for your unique needs. (The photos show a quartered portion, so you can see what that looks like.)  It does keep in the refrigerator for a while, but this is REAL food, so it will go bad eventually!