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Cucumber Ketchup

A cucumber-based ketchup made by mashing cucumbers, salting, extracting juice, boiling with seasoning, and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,991 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Draw out the juice

  1. Peel and mash the cucumbers.

  2. Sprinkle salt over the mashed cucumbers and let sit for 24 hours to draw out the juice.

  3. Strain the juice from the cucumbers.

Cook and store

  1. Boil the juice with seasoning to taste.

  2. Store the ketchup in bottles and seal tightly.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the juice that becomes the ketchup base, as they are mostly water.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mashed cucumbers, releasing the juice used for the ketchup.

The step that matters

Salting and resting the mashed cucumbers. Salt draws water out of the cucumber cells through osmosis. Letting the mash sit for the full 24 hours before straining gives the juice time to release, so less juice is lost in the strained result.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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