Arkansas’ best
From Arkansas’ tomatoes
WHAT ELSE would Gentle Reader think we’d be writing about in the midst of this sweltering July heat but a perfect, allArkansas summer salad featuring this state’s glorious tomatoes in all their variety and appeal?
That vision, now turned into a project, obsession and then a business, occurred to budding entrepreneur Amber Davis-Tanner when she was on vacation in Oregon last year. That’s when she saw that almost every restaurant up there gave star billing on its menu to home-made ketchup made from home-grown tomatoes in that state. Why couldn’t the Natural State do the same with its luscious tomato crop in all its variety and appeal? For tomatoes she knew, having grown up on her grandparents’ Arkansas farm and helped harvest the tomato crop every year.
“I was like, Arkansas has amazing tomatoes,” she recalls. “Why don’t we have Arkansas ketchup?” Since then, she and her friend John Crowley founded Arkansas Ketchup Co., which uses tomatoes garnered from farms across the state and turns them into great-tasting ketchup. Is it too late for Arkansas to catch up with Oregon in the ketchup department? Not if these two startup specialists have anything to say about it—and they have lots, being crackerjack salesmen as well as talented cooks. At last report, their 12-ounce bottles of Arkansas’ ketchup have started showing up at at select grocery stores in the state’s capital city. The enterprise began modestly enough with just a little capital but an unbounded supply of inspiration, innovation and imagination.
At first these two hobbyist cooks and aspiring capitalists called up a number of recipes on the Internet and began mixing and matching them with their own enthusiasm and personal tastes, trying them out on spouses, friends, relatives and just about anybody interested in a new/old taste thrill.
How could they go wrong once they started with Arkansas tomatoes? Which are many a step up from those little round softballs shot full of noxious gases and then shipped cross-country to take advantage of innocents who may never have tasted a real tomato in their lives. These simulacra of real live tomatoes may be produced hydroponically—but without the greenhouses that give them a chance to resemble the real thing. These phony tomatoes are made for shipping, not eating. They may look as appetizing as one of those full-color spreads in a magazine, but they have all the taste of a magazine, not a tomato.
The poor farmer trying to grow one of these ersatz tomatoes in Florida, say, has to face all the ills that nature seems to reserve for those species that try to fool it: wild temperature swings that can freeze the tomato crop one week and then the next expose it to the heat, blight, pests and other plagues of what’s called the Sunshine State. Why then even try? For three simple reasons: money, money and money. Tomato-starved consumers up north may be so desperate for an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness tomato they’ll pay good money for anything that looks but only looks like one.
NOTHING may make the genuine Arkansas tomato look better than comparing it with its genetically shortchanged cousins, but there’s still one born every minute, and those who settle for these substitutes may not know what they’re missing— until they bite into one of these phonies.
By contrast, the Arkansas Ketchup Co. is offering people the genuine article, and its plans for making honestto-goodness Arkansas ketchup make the mouth water. Add the just right mix of spices and Arkansas ketchup could become as well-loved and well-known and highly profitable as Louisiana’s Tabasco sauce. Or maybe even the better-than-Tabasco clear hot sauce Panola makes near Lake Providence.
If this sounds like a paid advertisement for Arkansas ketchup, it’s not. It’s something much better—an expression of pride in the next Arkansas-made product of our farms and factories and kitchens. Keep it up, Ms. Davis-Tanner and Mr. Crowley. And pass the french fries, hushpuppies, and fresh-caught and just-fried crappie, would you, please?