welcome friends today in the kitchen we are going to make tonic water and I know
that as soon as I said tonic water there's probably already people writing
comments down below about how dangerous this is and you know what they they're
probably right it is a fairly not necessarily dangerous but it is fraught
with difficulties and one of the reasons that this could be construed as a very
dangerous thing to make is that the main ingredient is cinchona bark and
cinchona bark contains quinine and too much quinine for certain people will
cause problems too much quinine for people who are on certain drugs will
cause interactions that are problematic and when you buy commercial tonic water
in the grocery store or at the corner store or at the liquor store it's
carefully measured how much quinine is in that beverage well below the safe
levels enough to give you the flavor that you're looking for and the
bitterness that you're looking for but well within what is considered safe the
problem with making it at home is you have no clue how much quinine is
actually contained in the bark for the most part you're not going to get a
document saying certain percentages in here so you need to be careful that you
don't use too much and a lot of the recipes or formulas that I looked at had
a lot of a lot a lot of chinchilla bark in them which gave you a lot of quinine
in the end beverage which could be a problem so I'm trying to be very safe
with the amount of chinchilla bark I'm using I'm using chopped internal bark
don't use powdered and I sift it out all of the powder to make sure that there's
none of that fine powder in there because that fine powder will allow you
to extract too much quinine so very small amount of Kanchana bark in order
to make sure that we have enough bitterness the next thing I'm using is
gentian route now gentian route is incredibly bitter so the amount of
bitterness that I'm going to get out of the gentian route will make up for some
of the chinchilla bark that I'm not using in order to kind of stay in the
safe side so I'm gonna put that in so I've got
females of water in here I've got the barks in I've got it on kind of a
medium-high heat I want to bring this up to a boil if you're only making
bog-standard tonic water we would stop at those ingredients actually no we'd
add some citric acid and some salt bring this up to a boil cover it let it boil
for 8 to 10 minutes and then we would move on to the part where we strain it
out when we have the sugar but I'm not gonna make bog-standard tonic water
because one of the great things about making this is when you make it at home
can tailor to your own taste and you can start to add other things to round out
the flavor and part of this rounding out the flavor also allows you to match it
to your favorite gin so that when you mix two together you get an amazing
cocktail and I've had the great privilege of sitting down a few times
with one of the major gin distillers and go through this process of making our
own tonic to match their gin and of course they do it with extracts so that
you can quickly make five or six different ones over the course of an
hour and a half or two hours so you've got all the extracts like orange peel
and lemon and and that sort of thing I'm gonna make it right from scratch I'm
gonna use some of the components that I really like from those experiments and
we're gonna make it here we're gonna see what happens so next in I've got
cardamom allspice black pepper and these are whole
I didn't crush them or crack them or break them or anything I'm just putting
them in because they're gonna boil and they're gonna steep and we're gonna get
the flavor out of them next in is some chopped lemongrass we have lime peel
lemon peel and orange peel so as this comes up to a boil I'm going to put a
lid on it and I'm just gonna leave the lid cracked a little bit so some steam
can escape and we're gonna let that go 8 to 10 minutes
smells great in here absolutely fantastic so I'm going to take this off
the heat and I'm going to strain out the big bits now depending on how fine your
strainer is and if you have any small floaty bits you may want to put this
through a coffee filter if you don't have any little floaty bits or fine
particulate which I don't think I do you might not
I think I might do it just in case okay
so I'm glad I took the time to put it through a coffee filter because it
really did trap a lot of really fine particulate matter so liquid back into
the pot and now we need to dissolve this sugar into that liquid let's give it a
taste first oh it's perfect that's perfect okay so the sugar in I've
got the heat on that is the maximum amount of sugar that that liquid will
take we're gonna bring this up to the point where it is fully dissolved we're
going to keep stirring it until it is fully dissolved and then I'm going to
pour it off let it cool and then we'll come back for tasting
so Glenn you have been talking about this for a while you finally made it
tonic yes it's good to go
there's a round flavor there it's got the tart the bite that I like a boat on
yeah but it's got another flavor in there that I'm not used to in tonic that
is yes so instead of just doing the the quinine bite or that really tart
over-the-top bitter that that it usually is I rounded it out with a bunch of
other flavors okay and I think that I haven't quite got the ratio yet of of
sirits yeah I think it could stand a little bit more syrup it's super syrupy
it is ver serving a lot of the other beverages we made yeah now I know at the
beginning I said don't go overboard with the chinchilla bark because quinine is
dangerous but of course you can play with the mixture at you know what you
want you could definitely bump it up you could definitely put in some of the
other bittering agents that I used right so the gentian route certainly would add
to that so you could add more I think this is something that you can play with
and you find your own balance of what you're looking for that's the best thing
about making anything yourself right so you play with this tonic so that it
suits whatever gin that you want to drink it with and if you've got a
favorite gin then you start to add in those flavors that are in the gin or
complementary flavors to the gym I think this is quite nice I think I could
actually drink this more than I could drink a can of tonic water
I like both mm-hmm so I'm gonna use this in the cocktail series that I'm hoping
to shoot towards the end of September beginning of October they'll start to
show up on Friday nights so I guess the first one that we'll do will be a gin
and tonic they're stopping by see you again soon just
patrícia luck
you