Ingredient Recipes

Cranberry-Elderflower Syrup

Quick ingredient post, I wasn’t trying to do anything fancy, in fact I just needed to do something with this cranberry juice that was about to go past the due date!

So making a syrup out of it seemed to make the most practical sense, and that’s what I did.

Okay, maybe I couldn’t help myself, and maybe I did grab my Foodpairing book. No exhaustive search, I just took the first thing that pairs with cranberry and that I had available to me: elderflower! I have some dried elderflower, so I filled one of those tea-eggs and once the sugar had dissolved I put the elderflower-filled tea-egg in, left the pan on the lowest heat and let it simmer for a little bit, 5-10 minutes maybe (watch that your syrup doesn’t start cooking!). At the same time I also threw in a cinnamon stick, because why not.

There’s not much straining to do, but I did it anyway just to make sure there were no bits that could go moldy. I made this syrup only 1:1 sugar-to-juice, so I also added 0.5 grams of citric acid with the idea that this should extend the shelf-life. We’ll see how that goes!

What did I make with this syrup you ask? Well, I’m actually still looking for the right one. But I let a bunch of people taste the syrup itself and they were are really pleasantly surprised and it was very difficult for them to guess even 1 of the ingredients. It has a nice balance of fruity-but-not-recognizably-cranberry and floral-spice notes. The syrup does work in a whiskey sour and a daiquiri, but not in such a way that they deserve their own posts.

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