Jufran banana sauce / banana catsup – not horrible on ice cream

[rworange]

Reading a topic about different condiments, I decided to try banana catsup.

It is made from bananas but has the look and taste of tomato catsup ... sort of.

Here’s a little more about it and a picture courtesy of Hormel.

http://www.hormel.com/kitchen/glossary.asp?id=38001

There are two types – regular and hot. The regular is a little sweeter than catsup but similar. The spicy ... like spicy catsup.

Let me preface this with the fact that there is not another person I could find on the web that dislikes this stuff ... except me.

The texture though is closer to mashed bananas ... quivering ... gelatinous ... mashed bananas ... turned red courtesy of red dye # 40. Here’s a wild guess. Mashed bottled bananas probably are an unattractive color and the dye is to cover that up.

It also separates, so there is a watery layer around the catsup. Yet, it is twice as difficult as catsup to remove from the bottle. It needed to be persuaded out with a knife.

The only reason for this would be if you are in an area with more bananas than tomatoes.

Since there were mentions of using it on ice cream ... I sucked it in and gave it a try. It was ... ok.

Dealing with a condiment that was originally bananas, I settled on Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ... perhaps the catsup would be happy to meet up with another banana product. I didn’t have a lot of it, but it wasn’t awful. The hot catsup gave the ice cream a pleasant spicy kick. The regular added a pleasant saltiness. It looked pretty gross though.

Here’s the nutritional info.

http://www.asianfoodgrocer.com/browseproducts/Banana-Sauce-Regular.HTML

The label says “All Natural, No Preservatives” Then the ingredients listed includes - sodium benzoate (E211) as preservative, acidulant, FD&C Yellow #5 (E102), FD&C Red #40 (E129), titanium dioxide (E171
)
Made by Heinz in the Phillipines.

Suggested for use on or in:

Omeletes *, steamed rice and veggies, cake !, lumpia, ice cream *, spaghetti, deep-fried sweet-potatoes, french fries*, BBQ sauce, cocktail sauce, hot dogs *, grilled poultry, pad thai .

* tried that ... once
! don’t think so ... we are talking catsup on cake ... no, no, no

Here’s an great article about the history of catsup which got its start in 17th-century China as Ke-tsiap, a spicy pickled-fish condiment. There is an amusing story about the million dollar settlement by Del Monte when a woman fed catsup to her cat. The cat’s hair started to glow orange-red. Guess the Del Monte slogan at the time “Even Cats like our Catsup!”, wasn’t such a good idea. Someone should have actually tested it on a cat.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5536/ketchup.html

Previous Chowhound posts.

http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/289713
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/289429
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/...

[JMF]

By the way... at the end of that humorous "article" the author states that the whole thing is fiction.

[rworange]

Ah too bad. If my cat ... that eats practically anything ... would only consider catsup ... regular or banana ... I might have given it a try to give her a hip punk look.

However, just a note that it is the amusing stories in that article that are fiction. There are countless mentions both on and off-line that the most probable origin of catsup is as stated any number of dictionaries ...

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ketchup

While not 100 percent reliable, wikipedia says

"The most popular theory is that the word ketchup was derived from "koe-chiap" or "ke-tsiap" in the Amoy dialect of China, where it meant the brine of pickled fish or shellfish"

Wikipedia has a pretty good article with lots of catsup/ketchup links. Given the origins of the word, I guess I should start using the spelling that starts with the letter k, but catsup is so much easier and I like the cat story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup

Gotta love that early cookbook recipe where you squeeze 100 tomatoes by hand into a pulp and add Bayn's Guts.