Ketchup sucks in South East Asia

Read the title with a bit of an "lol" in your voice because when I say it sucks, I mean that it sucks compared to the palate of the average westerner or at the minimum, the average North American.

Before moving overseas I wasn't really familiar with the fact that there possibly could be a bunch of different types of ketchup. In my mind ketchup was just ketchup like orange juice is orange juice.

How different can it possibly be? Well, as it turns out, it can be quite a lot different and at least from my perspective, this isn't a good thing.

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This is a popular brand of ketchup you will find everywhere in Vietnam. It seems to be the default brand on tables in restaurants and in those little packets that come with take away food. It is lighter than what I would consider to be "real" ketchup and has a strange sweetness to it that I do not care for.

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It's also got some sort of syrup consistency to it, almost like maple syrup and to me this is just weird.

There are a ton of other brands as well and they are all just slightly cheaper than a "good" brand like Heinz. The price difference is so small that I think it would take a truly stingy sort of person to buy the local brand instead of the internationally known brand. So there must be some other reason such as locals preferring the sweet and runny version.

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If you are a westerner you have probably experienced the difficulty in getting the Heinz out of the bottle. Let me tell you, this is not something you will ever experience with Asian ketchup unless you freeze it. That stuff is runny, almost like water.

I get a bit annoyed when I have something delivered, especially if it is as American notion of food like hamburgers or hot dogs and it comes with the budget ketchup that just tastes "wrong" in my opinion. Because of this I have a bottle of Heinz in my fridge at all times even though I don't use very much ketchup.

I like ketchup, but if the only choice i have is to put pancake syrup tasting ketchup on my fries, I will often just choose to not have any sauce at all.

I was in an A&W restaurant years ago and noticed that they had 2 pumps in the sauce areas: "American ketchup" and "tomato sauce". I think this was the first time I really became aware of the fact that this might not be a budget thing, it is a question of taste.

I'm not saying anyone is wrong: Go ahead and like whatever you want to like. But for me, the Asian ketchup notions are not something I really want on my fries and I think if you are visiting over here from especially North America, you might end up feeling the same. It is actually quite rare for a place to have Heinz on the tables and you might end up a little bit surprised with what you get!