Jan: I am a Southern girl, and as a Southern girl, we love sweet tea around my house. I'm
going to show you how I make a raspberry sweet tea. This stuff is awesome.
Over here, I've got about 3 or 4 cups of water; that's all you need. Four family-size teabags,
and you can get this all over the place, look for the ones that say they're specially bended.
Over here I have 2 cups of water and 2 cups of sugar, which is the makings of simple syrup.
It's a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water. I have 1½ cup of raspberries.
If you happen to have a good inexpensive source of fresh raspberries, knock yourself out.
Where we live, they're hideously expensive. For this, you're going kick the fire out of
them anyways so it doesn't really matter. What we're doing here is making a raspberry
simple syrup. I've got this on medium heat. I'm going to bring this up to a boil and I'm
going to let it simmer for and probably 5 minutes or so. We're going to get the raspberries
nice and squishy; we're going to dissolve all the sugar. Over here, all I'm doing to
these teabags is I'm going to bring these up to a boil and let them sit. I know that's
a lot of tea for that amount of water, but don't forget, you got a lot more water over
here. Then we're going to add ice to the whole thing. Bring this to a boil, cut it off, let
it just sit there and steam. Bring this tool boil; give it 5 minutes. I'll show you what
looks like after that.
I brought my teabags tool boil and I let them come off of the heat immediately, but I let
them steep for about 5 minutes or so. You can see that's some pretty dark tea. You don't
want to steep any longer than that because then your tea gets bitter, but you do want
a nice strong base for this, and that is. I don't know why I poured that through the
strainer, but I did. This is what you need to pour . . . get out of here. This is what
you need to pour through the strain. I'll start smacking you. That's what mamas do with
wooden spoons.
This is our raspberry simple syrup. If you don't like tea very, very sweet, cut the sugar
in half, cut it down to 1 cup. Like I said we're super Southerners, you can get more
sugar in there for us, enough sugar in there for us. Now I'm going to make a mess. This
part you do want to strain. Look at the . . . can you see what's floating on the top of the
liquid? Those are the raspberry seeds. You really don't want those in there. They're
not going to hurt you; they might get in your teeth and drive you nuts. If I had a dental
floss sponsor, we could promote the ingestion of raspberry seeds. Actually, there are a
couple of illnesses or conditions where you don't want to eat those. Not many.
You think you can stand over there and whisper, and nobody's going to hear you trying to get
my attention?
Male: I about ruined your video when I smacked my hip on the doorknob.
Jan: I'm glad you didn't cuss camera. That was my oldest trying to let me know he should
be commended for not cussing on camera. He was trying to sneak the laundry in.
Male: I smacked my hipbone.
Jan: Pardon me. All you do here is run that through the strainer. You want every last
drop of raspberry goodness. You really do want to work it through. Raspberries are . . . they're
so good. We're getting down to the . . . it doesn't have a whole lot more to give up.
Have you fogged up the camera yet? That was smooth. Give me half a second. Let me do a
little cleanup and I will be back.
Male: We're on film.
Jan: All right, fine. Thank you.
Male: You can cut it out.
Jan: Now can I go?
Male: Yeah.
Jan: Normally, I would tell you to fill the rest of the container up with ice and stir
it, and then you can serve it, except we use all of the ice a little while ago and I didn't
realize it. We're down to that much, which is probably not enough. Anyways, I put cold
water in here to bring it up to about a gallon, because you're going to end up with a gallon.
Normally you would fill it up part with ice. This is great. Watch this. It's nice to have
relatives two doors down. Normally you would fill that up with ice. It's still pretty warm
so it's going to melt our ice. I don't care because I'm going to have it anyway. Watch
me spill it because I don't have the lid on. Yep, that's all pretty.
Child: Can I get that glass?
Jan: You might want to make 2 gallons because it goes pretty fast. That's how you make raspberry
ice tea.