This is probably one of my most requested wild condiments – my Porcini & Hawthorn Berry Ketchup. 🍄🌿

Hawthorn berries make the most incredible base for a wild ketchup. Once cooked and sieved, they become thick, fruity and beautifully tangy, somewhere between a traditional tomato ketchup and a rich brown sauce.

Then come the wild spices: toasted hogweed and Alexander seeds for warmth and complexity, and plenty of porcini powder, which completely transforms it. The porcini brings a deep, earthy umami and almost smoky richness that makes this ketchup ridiculously good.

Serve it with burgers, sausages, chips, roasted vegetables, cheese, sourdough – basically anything you’d normally reach for ketchup or brown sauce for.

And if you’ve tasted this at one of our Wild Roots events, this is the recipe you’ve been waiting for.

Ingredients

• 600g ripe hawthorn berries
• 750ml filtered water, plus extra if needed
• 170g organic sugar
• 300ml raw apple cider vinegar
• 2 tsp toasted and ground hogweed seeds
• 2 tsp toasted and ground Alexander seeds
• Pinch of sea salt
• ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 3 heaped tsp porcini powder

Method

1. Remove any obvious stalks and leaves from the hawthorn berries and give them a good wash.
2. Add the berries and 750ml filtered water to a large saucepan.
3. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the berries are completely soft and mushy. Keep an eye on the pan and add a little more water if needed — you don’t want the berries to catch on the bottom.
4. Once completely softened, push the cooked berries and their liquid through a fine sieve. Really work the pulp through with the back of a spoon to extract as much of that beautiful hawthorn flesh as possible. Discard the stones and other material left in the sieve.
5. Return the smooth hawthorn pulp to the pan and add the sugar, apple cider vinegar, toasted hogweed seed, Alexander seed, salt and black pepper.
6. Bring everything together over a gentle heat, stirring until the sugar has dissolved.
7. Simmer gently, stirring regularly, until the ketchup has reduced to your preferred consistency. Remember that it will thicken further as it cools, so stop while it’s still slightly looser than you’d ultimately like it.
8. Stir through 3 heaped teaspoons of porcini powder towards the end of cooking. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed.
9. Spoon into clean sterilised bottles or jars and allow to cool.

A Little Wild Roots Tip

The porcini is what takes this from a lovely hawthorn ketchup to something really special.

Porcini powder gives it an incredible savoury depth without making the finished ketchup taste overwhelmingly mushroomy. Combined with toasted hogweed and Alexander seeds, you get layers of fruity, tangy, earthy, smoky and warmly spiced flavour.

If you forage porcini when they’re abundant, drying and grinding them into powder is also one of the easiest ways to preserve that flavour for recipes like this throughout the year.

Foraging Note

Hawthorn berries contain hard seeds/stones that shouldn’t be crushed or eaten, which is why the cooked fruit is pushed through a sieve and the remaining stones discarded.

Common hogweed and Alexanders both belong to the Apiaceae family, which also contains highly toxic species. Only gather and use wild plants and fungi that you can identify with complete confidence.

Storage

Because the final acidity and water activity will vary depending on how far you reduce your ketchup, I wouldn’t treat this recipe as a tested shelf-stable preserve.

Transfer it to sterilised containers and store it in the fridge once cooled. For longer storage, freeze it in suitable portions. If you wanted to make this reliably shelf-stable for selling or storing at room temperature, the recipe would need an appropriate validated preserving process rather than relying on the vinegar quantity alone.