Ketchup, but not as you know it

Pears, carrots, quince… Bring your food to life with a range of unlikely ketchups

ROSE LLOYD OWEN, the founder of the event-catering company Peardrop, is bottling green ketchup when we speak. A mixture of green tomatoes, ripe pears, fennel, nettles and frothy carrot tops, it’s a mustardy-green shade rather than racing or pea, but the taste – subtly sweet and tangy, a good match for roast pork – has finally hit the spot after Lloyd Owen’s lengthy experiments in the kitchen. ‘I found it impossible to make straight fennel ketchup,’ she says. ‘Then I fell upon the idea of adding green tomatoes when I was in New York.’

It completes a trio of sauces, joining red beetroot and an amber-orange smoked-carrot and quince, which she has developed for retail after they proved so popular in the healthy lunches Peardrop creates for offices.

She set herself two rules: that the key ingredient should be grown in this country; and that each ketchup must ‘contain something that I or someone I know has picked’. Hence blackberries with beetroot, picked largely by her mother, and the glut of quince gathered from relatives.

Lloyd Owen has always loved collecting edible flowers and herbs for pestos, salsa verde and wild-garlic aioli, and on trips to the Scilly Isles, plucks gorse flowers (‘slightly vanilla-y and coconutty’) for her cooking. Wild honey from Norfolk, where she grew up, goes into the smoked-carrot version, and foraged nettles are dried and whizzed to a powder to preserve their colour. ‘I always put too much ketchup on my food,’ she happily admits. Which from these bottles is no bad thing.

Peardrop Wild Ketchup, £3.95 for 250ml, peardroplondon.com

Top right Sea spinach, wild fennel and blackberries picked on the Isles of Scilly.Right Rose Lloyd Owen picking blackberries for her beet, blackberry and blackpepper ketchup