Sliced Ketchup Is the Condiment You Never Asked For
Do you love the taste of ketchup but hate the way it adds moisture and visual appeal to a variety of foods? Are you a busy person on the go, with only a few minutes a day to dedicate to your passion project of trying to create the world’s strangest sandwich? Then you need to hear about ketchup slices. Yes, slices.
Slice of Sauce™ is a new crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, and creators Emily Williams and Thac Lecong say they’re going to “revolutionize the way that we sauce” with their new product, which looks just like a Fruit Roll-Up made of ketchup.
As Munchies points out, slices of ketchup were actually pioneered by Los Angeles chef Ernesto Uchimura of Plan Check, who called his invention “ketchup leather” and started using the slices on burgers in 2014.
Making ketchup into fruit leather is a pretty cool novelty that sounds like it might be a fun thing to try just to say you’ve had the experience. And Uchimura did say it made his ultra-juicy gourmet burgers slightly less soggy on their buns. But now Williams and Lecong want to make solid ketchup slices commercially available in stores, and they seem to think it will be a super-convenient culinary game-changer that’s going to improve the lives of busy people all over America.
“Slice of Sauce needs no refrigeration, so it’s great for lunch boxes, picnics, barbecues, hiking and camping, lunches at your desk or eating on the go,” the Kickstarter says.
“Anyone on the go will appreciate that it’s portable and can be used anywhere,” Lecong explained.
If only ketchup already came in tiny, portable, individual portions that did not need to be refrigerated. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe in a little packet or something.
Slices of ketchup might be less messy than regular ketchup, but ketchup leather doesn’t seem like it’d be a very satisfying replacement for regular ketchup, because half the point of ketchup is that it is a sauce. We want sauces on sandwiches!
A sandwich without mustard, mayo, ketchup, olive oil, or some sort of sauce or dressing is generally going to be dry and sad. Sauces also help maintain the structural integrity of a sandwich — a BLT without mayo would be a crumbly mess, for example, and you’d likely lose a lot of valuable bacon.
Williams and Lecong seem to have been right about the idea that Americans wanted solid ketchup, though, because their Kickstarter has already met its $15,000 fundraising goal. That means the ketchup slice revolution is really happening, and you can try eight slices of Slice of Sauce’s ketchup for $10, or 24 slices for a $25 contribution.
The ketchup slices are expected to ship in June. If you don’t want to wait that long, or pay $1 per serving for ketchup, you can make ketchup leather yourself at home by spreading it on some parchment paper and baking it at 200°F for about three hours, until it’s slightly tacky. Check out the whole recipe at Thrive Market.
What do you think of Slice of Sauce’s ketchup slices?