Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Squeezy Bottle

...the same.

Heinz tomato sauce is as popular over here in England, as it is all over the world. Originally from the USA, we have adopted it over here as one of our own. Probably the best known and most popular of Heinz 57 varieties, it is present on every café table in England, in every town, city and metropolis. In fact the yanks pinched it off the Chinese, and it was originally called ke-tsiap or something, which means fish sauce, ...
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Without Heinz tomato sauce, I am sure the wheels of British industry would stop turning. Every works canteen in the country is home to the delicious, red, flavoursome, tomato treat. Every bacon buttie in the country has a drop on top. Every road side burger van and every greasy spoon café, has a copious supply ready to drown the filthy food they serve with some kind of flavour.

Heinz tomato sauce is a delicious accompaniment ... more

Hmmmnnn.....Heinz tomato Ketchup, I love it!

This is my favourite of all tomato sauces, yes simply the best.

It’s available in all kinds of glass and plastic bottles sachets and containers, but the stuff inside is all the same.

Heinz tomato sauce is as popular over here in England, as it is all over the world. Originally from the USA, we have adopted it over here as one of our own. Probably the best known and most popular of Heinz 57 varieties, it is present on every café table in England, in every town, city and metropolis. In fact the yanks pinched it off the Chinese, and it was originally called ke-tsiap or something, which means fish sauce, obviously it was hi jacked when America was a big melting pot of cultures and stolen by the Germans. Maybe they put a beach towel over it or something and claimed they were using it ?

Without Heinz tomato sauce, I am sure the wheels of British industry would stop turning. Every works canteen in the country is home to the delicious, red, flavoursome, tomato treat. Every bacon buttie in the country has a drop on top. Every road side burger van and every greasy spoon café, has a copious supply ready to drown the filthy food they serve with some kind of flavour.

Heinz tomato sauce is a delicious accompaniment to almost any meal you can care to think of. Anything from chips, baked potatoes, pies, pasta, spaghetti, BBQs, salsa, chilli, curry, sausage, vege burgers, tofu, also good to add to recipes to add flavour to sauces, and casseroles. They say it is great as a cooking ingredient, but I don’t get that one, as with many processed foods its loaded with sugar, and all you really need to add to your recipes instead of Heinz tomato ketchup is tomato paste and/or a bit of sugar. I’m not convinced it would add to any particular recipe I could think of, just dollop a bit on top when your done, that’s what I say....

The latest slogan over here for Heinz tomato sauce, is “you cant eat without it”, which is funny because, there is a greasy spoon café in my town, who are so fond of it, they will not let you leave until you have had some on your chips.

They’re almost as bad as these chaps ;

“The Heinz Ketchup Police force has been founded to protect the public from inferior Tomato Ketchup substitutes. Recent research has shown that there are a growing number of homes and food service outlets which have been found to deprive consumers of the only genuine article in food accompaniments - Heinz Tomato Ketchup.”.......Heinz ketchup home page

The force patrols the streets to ensure that Heinz Tomato Ketchup is on every menu, from burger vans to top quality restaurants, so that it remains at the heart of the British nation.

An interesting and slightly ‘comical’ conceit, by Heinz, to bully us into buying their sauce ( I have a picture at the bottom of the page) well if any of ‘em come round our way in their rather camp, red uniforms, I think they’ll get duffed up as traffic wardens, or better yet those community patrol officers, those jumped up little Hitlers who would have you arrested for jay walking. We’ve got some of them in Hull, they ponce around with their day glow jackets, peaked caps and clip boards looking for cats stuck up trees, and little old ladies to help across the road. Maybe they should team up with the Heinz tomato ketchup police force to make sure were all buying the correct tomato sauce ! ( they’d be more use )

The next story is true !

If the good folk of Kilburn ever run out of tomato ketchup, it won’t be Patsy’s and Tammy’s fault.

The ketchup-mad sisters have turned their grocery store into a Ketchup-only store by clearing all the shelves of other products to make way for 9,432 bottles of Heinz Tomato Ketchup!

Patsy and Tammy took the decision after they read in the local paper that Kilburn is the Tomato Ketchup capital of the country!

The average Kilburn household gets through 4,400g of ketchup per year; 33 per cent more than the national average (3,300g) according to a study by Heinz released last week.

“When I heard the news I thought it would be a great way to get some local publicity for the store,” said Tammy. She approached Heinz who were more than happy to help.

Heinz Tomato Ketchup marketing manager Melissa Hill said; “We wish Patsy and Tammy well. We know that the people of Kilburn really do love their ketchup; maybe a ketchup-only shop is not such a whacky idea.”

How mad is that?

Yes only in England, land of ‘lovable’ eccentrics could anyone think of the idea of a shop that only sells Heinz tomato ketchup. Maybe they could sell coronary heart disease, rotten teeth, and obesity as well. I mean we all like a dollop of the red stuff, and all that but it doesn’t exactly promote healthy eating does it? I bet it’s next door to giant chip shop that only sell chips. And I bet they all have arses like builders bottoms, up there in Kilburn, if they’re cracking through that much Kats’up every year. Some one ought to tell them (it’s not that good for you).

Heinz has been proudly making Ketchup since 1876, and has developed a very special recipe. Heinz Tomato Ketchup contains more tomatoes and is higher in tomato solids than its sauce counterpart. It is spicier and they tell us it has that extra bite. Yes I’m inclined to agree, we’ve all had that sloppy stuff from Kwicksave or some where, that dribbles out of the bottle like diarrhea, not like Heinzs more robust and sturdy offering. You’ve got to wait a while if you’re a Heinz man(or woman) have a bit of patience as the luxurious lycopene packed lovely oozes from the bottle, gently teasing us with eager anticipation, as it falls to the plate, in delicate plops. Not whooshing out all over the bloomin’ place here there and everywhere, like a splurge of red peuke.....oooooeeerrrr, it’s gone all over me bloomin peas, I didn’t want it on me bloomin’ peas, I want it on me flippin’ chips ...Whaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Luckily.....If ketchup pours unaided at more than 0.0057 mph, it's rejected!, at the factory.

Of course with the new squeezy bottle you can overcome that problem and squirt it anywhere you please.

Suitable for a gluten free diet, suitable for a kosher diet. So if your having Jackie Mason to lunch or one of these poor people who can’t eat wheat products, you know what to give them on their chips.

The basic ingredients are, tomatoes, light corn syrup, white vinegar, water, sugar, salt, onion, powder, garlic powder

Heinz confirm that they do not use GM ingredients or derivatives in their products. Now we are getting to the topical issue of the day. How do Heinz stand on the Genetically modified food issue, well as I said they claim not to use GM ingredients or derivatives in their products, so we should be all right in that respect. I don’t know how much has been proven about GM foods but I think there’s more scare than proof at the moment. I get my information on wether foods are GM free or not, from the Greenpeace website, they have a reasonably breakdown on the “offenders”. GM crops were developed where they not to help alleviate the food shortages in poorer countries, at least partially and I think there has been too much bad press on the subject rather than trying to solve the issues, and use the new technology for what it was intended. More cheaper, better quality food, for the masses. I sometimes look at the label to see if a food is GM free or not but it’s mostly because of scare mongering and food terrorists, I don’t actually know or care very much if my Heinz tomato ketchup ha GM derived products or not. Though I will have to take Heinz and Greenpeaces word for it. I don’t suppose it affects the flavour very much.

Believe it or not Heinz have just developed a new ‘upside down’ squeezy bottle as well, so you can lift the bottle up from the table, and you do not have to turn it over to get the sauce out. The lid is on the bottom!, how silly is that ?

Heinz scientists spent years perfecting the new ‘Top Down’ format after consumers said they wanted the ketchup to come out of the bottle more easily without having to shake it. ‘Top Down’ also signals an end to waste with no more stubborn ketchup that refuses to come out of the bottle.

The new bottle has already been launched in the US and now makes its UK debut in supermarkets up and down the country. The big breakthrough is a special valve in the cap that gives consumers better control when squirting and eliminates the messy gloop that sometimes forms on the cap.

“The valve literally sucks ketchup back up the very instant that the squeezing stops,” explains Heinz Tomato Ketchup brand manager Melissa Hill.

I think that developing such a bottle is an extraordinary waste of time, and money, How lazy can people be, if they can’t be bothered to turn the bottle over, to get the sauce out ? Well done Heinz, that was a great help !

Also imagine coming home from the boozer, p*ssed as a fart with a packet of chips, and trying to splodge yer favourite tomato tipple on yer grub with an upside down bottle of tomato ketchup?...nice one Heinz but I don’t think you’ve thought it though?....don’t you know what kind of people buy your tomato ketchup? The trouble with these product developers they invent everything in the laboratory, without thinking how it relates to real life.

They’ve spent god knows how many millions developing an upside down bottle of sauce, when all you really need to do is turn the bloomin’ thing over.....!

Heinz Tomato Ketchup comes in 300ml & 600ml glass bottles and the now popular 500ml squeezy plastic bottle too. These size vary depending on which country you come from. In fact I think the sizes I have just given are the Australian sizes, I think our glass ones are 750ml, for the bog standard table sizes, which I still prefer over the squeezy, but I think that’s just tradition, as for the rest I’m not sure. I know you can get sachets, mainly for caterers, and giant tins, also for caterers, but I don’ think I’ ever bought anything else, than a 750ml.

Speaking of the Aussies maybe we should send them a few of the upside down bottles, see if they can make any sense of them. After all they should be the right way up down under shouldn’t they..... Hey....maybe that’s who they invented them for, and they didn’t want them, and now they’re trying to palm them off on us !!!

I’ve been reliably informed that Supermodel Caprice uses tomato ketchup to restore the lustre to her hair after swimming. I know I said I like Heinz tomato ketchup on anything but that’s just taking the p*ss.

On the UK website you can win a camera, if you send in a picture of your self eating Heinz tomato sauce on your favourite food! The winner will be selected, from the best picture. There’s all kinds of ketchup worshippers, pictured gobbling their favourite grub all smeared and dolloped of the century’s iconic red stuff.

I still like the old glass bottle because, they say you can tell a lot about the personality of someone by the way they use their tomato ketchup bottle. Apparently if you turn the bottle over and slap the bottom you are assertive, and domineering. If you dribble from the top in small streaks you are somewhat shy an cautious, and if you just shake it all over you are wild and impetuous. Interesting , but I’m not sure I believe it, what do you think ? If you see some one slapping the bottom of a bottle in a café, it might be wise to avoid them socially, after all they might turn out to be habitual bottom slappers or something, and we don’t want that do we?......or do we?....don’t answer!

( I wonder if Caprice is a bottom slapper, or do you think she’s a dribbler...? )

Heinz tomato ketchup has become such an icon over the years that Andy Warhol even did a piece including this popular consumer foodstuff. His installation work “Twenty Boxes”, (see Picture) includes twenty packing cases, for three popular foodstuffs. There are 10 Campbell's (Tomato Juice), 6 Del Monte (Peach Halves), 4 Heinz (Tomato Ketchup). These are part of a series of Warhols “Pop Art” work, featuring consumer consumables. There were of course the infamous Campbells soup cans, Brillo boxes, and coca-cola bottles. These boxes are not simply packing cases stolen from the shops and stacked on top of each other, they in fact silk screen images, printed on to wood and made into the shapes of packing crates. So this installation depicts the twenty boxes, rather than it being a collection of found objects, which would be quite different.

I think it is indicative of the iconic nature of Heinz tomato ketchup that Warhol should choose to use it as an icon of 20th century consumer society, and you could say that it had arrived, not only in the sense of being a popular consumer food but also as a part of American, and in fact world culture. As with the coca cola bottle and the Campbells soup can it is something we take for granted, and see everyday without really thinking about it, all we want to know is, does it taste good?, if we look behind the packaging we see something of the consumer, dependant society we live in, and the advertising, and image made psyche which dominates our lives.

I think what is particularly interesting about Warhols Heinz boxes is that they are not really Heinz boxes at all, they are simply depictions of Heinz boxes. So familiar are we with the brand and the product we immediately take them for the genuine article and are fooled into the artistic conceit, that Warhol has provided. This is part of the intention, that we no longer see things for what they are we merely graze on the information thrust at us from a thousand different images sources every day, and are swept along in a tide of consumer frenzy. They have been reproduced 'mechanically' , and as almost perfect reproductions, without having any actual interpretation by the artist.” I want to be a machine” said Andy.

If Warhol had used original boxes then, we would have to consider it more as an installation, and a collection of found objects. By creating facsimile of the objects, the artist creates a distance between himself and the objects, the product, and the society who produced them. He also creates a distance for us between us and the products and the society who made them in order that we might look at ourselves, as a subject, and not as a part of the process.

It is interesting to note how this contrasts with the new Brit art, which seems intent on making moral judgements, (most of which was burnt down in Sachhis ware house), which uses comments on popular culture. There is little interpretation, in “Twenty Boxes” we are merely presented with an image of ourselves, through our consumer society and left to make up our own minds.

For those of you more interested in eating Heinz tomato ketchup than thinking about it I stole this top secret recipe for Heinz tomato ketchup from the web.

One 6-ounce can tomato paste
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
Homemade ketchup in a pinch.

1. Combine all ingredients in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Whisk until smooth.
2. When mixture comes to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring often.
3. Remove pan from heat and cover until cool. Chill and store in a covered container. (http://www.topsecretrecipes.com)
Makes 1 1/2 cups.

Handy if you are allergic to any of the preservatives and stuff they put in the real thing. Also you can adjust the recipe to your own particular taste. Like putting less sugar in it or something. Heinz tomato ketchup can work out expensive if you use a lot of it so it might be worth making up a batch if you’re feeling a bit stingy, or want to go on an economy drive.

Price 460ml, squeezy bottle, £1.25

Anyway I’ve got a big bag of chips, with Heinz tomato ketchup waiting for me so I’m going to go and eat them .....................Yum Yum.

 

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