At this time of year, as the hot summer weather slowly becomes more autumnal, the stalls of the local markets are piled high with cheap plum tomatoes and huge red peppers.
These are not the type of sweet, juicy tomatoes or crisp red peppers you use for your salads. No, this produce serves another purpose.
When you see these tomatoes and peppers on the market, they’ll often have a label displaying the price and the word ‘salçalık’ (sal-cha-lerk).
Salça is Turkish tomato (or red pepper) paste that is used in cooking for flavouring and thickening sauces and it’s also used in cold meze dishes such as kısır and Antep Ezmesi.
For now, at least, we leave the salça to the experts.
However, these tomatoes and peppers do get bought up by us because they are perfect for making another famous type of Turkish sauce: Kahvaltılık sos.
Kahvaltılık Sos – The Best Homemade Ketchup
Have you ever made your own tomato ketchup and added your own little extras just to make it absolutely perfect for your taste?
That’s what we’re going to be doing with this recipe – it’s going to be a roasted red pepper and tomato sauce with a few little extras.
In Turkish, ‘kahvaltılık’ (kah-val-ti-lerk) means ‘for breakfast.’ So, ‘kahvaltılık sos’ means a sauce that you can have with your Turkish breakfast. Breakfast sauce.
However, don’t be fooled by the name. No need to limit yourself to breakfast times.
Like we said, this kahvaltılık sos is a homemade ketchup, and, when we make it, it isn’t long before we’ve polished off the lot. We eat it with lots of different foods.
Kahvaltılık Sos – A Homemade Ketchup Recipe
The great thing about kahvaltılık sos is there are no hard and fast rules about how it should be made.
It’s more of an umbrella term for certain sauces and dips that go well on the breakfast table.
Some people make acuka – similar to muhammara. Others use aubergines to make a patlıcan salatası.
Others will make a spicy dip like this super hot çemen we bought from the Friday village market in Fethiye.
This village version had fenugreek and the stalks from celeriac as well as chillies and sweet red peppers.
We like to make our homemade ketchup version because of its versatility. And because it lasts a while in the fridge so you can make a generous batch all at once.
Oh, and of course, it’s going be a spicy homemade ketchup!
We’re going to be using a mixture of oven and hob, roasting our peppers – and some garlic – and simmering our tomatoes right down into a thick sauce.
Roasting the peppers releases their sweetness.
How long the process takes will depend on the texture of your tomatoes and how juicy they are. You don’t want your sauce to be too thin and you certainly want all of your flavours to infuse.
Likewise, if your tomatoes don’t have many seeds and you feel the sauce is becoming too dry before they’ve really softened, you’ll need to add some splashes of water.
Once you have followed our homemade ketchup recipe, you should have a pan of sauce of the texture that looks similar to ours, below.
It might seem like, when you look at all the ingredients in the ketchup recipe, that there are too many chillies or too much garlic.
You can afford to go strong with kahvaltılık sos as all the flavours will infuse. So don’t worry about that.
However, if you don’t like spicy food, obviously, you can leave out the chillies.
And that’s how we make kahvaltılık sos.
As with our homemade hummus, we like to leave our sauce as it is. But if you want to make it more resemble a homemade ketchup, you can use a hand blender to make it smooth.
And if you really want to go the extra mile and have a smooth and shiny homemade ketchup, you can then push the sauce through a sieve.
Didn’t we just say this homemade ketchup is really versatile and not necessarily just for breakfast?
Well, that is true. But it is a perfect match for bazlama and a big pan of sucuklu yumurta! Let’s call it brunch.
You can also serve it with fresh simit, either on its own or on top of some beyaz peynir (white cheese).
It goes perfectly with our homemade sweet potato fishcakes and, naturally, is a dream combination when served aside homemade köfte.
Kahvaltılık Sos – The Best Homemade Ketchup Recipe
Homemade Ketchup Recipe (Kahvaltılık Sos)
Ingredients
- 1 kilogram tomatoes (finely chopped)
- 6 red capsicum peppers
- 6 long green peppers
- 5 chillies (finely chopped)
- 2 heads garlic
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 3 tablespoons vinegar
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 1 teaspoon thyme (or oregano)
- salt & pepper (to season)
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 220 degrees Celsius and place your red peppers on a tray.
- Once the oven is hot, place the peppers onto the middle shelf and leave to roast for 25-30 minutes until soft.
- Turn them over after around 15 minutes.
- Meanwhile, add your tomatoes, chillies, olive oil and vinegar to a large saucepan and start to simmer over a medium heat.
- Take 1 head of garlic and remove all the cloves.
- Peel and finely chop each clove before adding it to your tomatoes.
- Give everything a stir and continue to simmer.
- Once your red peppers are soft, remove from the oven and the tray and leave to cool.
- Take your second head of garlic and remove the cloves (you don’t need to peel them).
- Place the green peppers and the garlic cloves onto your oven tray and place the tray back into the oven on the middle shelf.
- Leave to roast for around 20-25 minutes.
- Meanwhile, add your sugar, seasoning and the rest of your herbs and spices to your tomatoes and stir everything together.
- When your green peppers and garlic are soft, remove from the oven.
- Peel and deseed all of your peppers (the skin should come away easily – don’t worry about any stubborn bits).
- Finely chop the peppers and add them to your sauce.
- Now remove the skin from the garlic cloves – again, this will come away easily – and chop them up into a paste.
- Add the garlic to your sauce and stir.
- Once your ketchup is at the consistency you like, remove from the heat and allow to cool.
- When the sauce has cooled, place it into sterilised jars and seal the lids.
Notes
- The green peppers in this recipe are the long, pointed Turkish carliston peppers. If you can’t get those, you can use 1 or 2 green bell peppers.
- This homemade ketchup is all about your personal taste. If you don’t like chillies or garlic, you can leave them out.
- You can sterilise your jars by submerging them in boiling water for 10 minutes.
- Calories & servings are very approximate. It depends how much you like to use in one sitting…
Nutrition
- This kahvaltılık sos – homemade ketchup – recipe makes just over 1 litre. We divide it between separate jars. Once open, it will last 7-10 days in the fridge. The sealed jars will last around 6 weeks.
- You can find this recipe in the breakfast section on our Turkish recipes page.
Afiyet Olsun!