You may have noticed that one of the most common
cocktail ingredients is Sugar Syrup or Simple Syrup, but what exactly is it?
It basically is what it says on the tin.
So it's just a syrup made using sugar, because sugar itself can be quite hard to dissolve in
sort of alcohol and citrus, and the other things that you're generally using in your cocktail,
especially once you introduce ice to it and everything's very cold,
then you could quite easily end up with some granules. So working with the liquid
is just much easier for measurements and mess and kind of consistency.
So how do you make it?
Well it's pretty simple really. You just have to combine
some sugar and some water until it's all nice and dissolved and a syrup.
There are a couple of ratios that you can do this in and when people just say sugar syrup
or simple syrup they're generally talking about one part sugar to one part water,
and that's a pretty safe guess if you just see a recipe that calls for sugar syrup.
You can also do what's known as a rich sugar syrup and that's two parts sugar to one part water,
which is obviously a lot more viscous and sweet and can kind of bring like
a real intense little punch of sweetness there.
Obviously if you're using that then generally you use a little bit less of it as well.
Here we're just going to do a very simple one-to-one ratio. Quite honestly,
if you don't really feel like measuring and weighing, out which I completely understand,
because this is you know quite an easy job that you could definitely do quite quickly,
just using two containers of the same size, so for instance you know,
one half of your shaker tin filled with sugar and then one half filled with water.
It might not be you know to the mill or the gram exact but
it's not going to ruin your cocktails if you just want to do it like that,
otherwise we can weigh out the sugar and then measure out the water.
So we'll just go with 150 grams of sugar, just using regular caster sugar,
you can really again you can play with this a little bit something like Demerara sugar
works really well in kind of darker like rum drinks and whiskey drinks and things like that,
and obviously gives that kind of like more intense caramel flavor that you get from that sugar,
so you know, you can definitely play around the same sort of basic principles apply for all of
the sugars, but this is just yet you're kind of regular granulated caster sugar.
I think.
Every time I talk about sugar someone tells me there's some
other kind of sugar that I haven't heard of, but yeah, normal sugar.
And then we'll just go the same amount in mils of water. Now you can obviously actually just
throw this until it combines, actually again a bit of a cheat, especially in a bar environment,
is to use hot water out of the coffee machine and that just melts it straight or dissolves it
straight away, but otherwise the quickest way is just going to be to pop it on some heat,
just for literally until as long as it takes for the sugar to dissolve.
You're not really trying to reduce it down or kind of do anything to it at this point
you're just wanting everything to be incorporated.
Just give it a little stir.
And that's really all you need.
So as soon as it's turned clear that means that all the sugar is
dissolved and you have your sugar syrup. All you need to do is let that cool down
and then you can bottle it up and it keeps in the fridge for honestly quite a while.
Again, if you're actually in a bar environment then I would say never
kind of more than two weeks for anything that's homemade and not stabilized,
but given that there's not any fruit or anything like that in there to actually
turn and go off it's it's honestly one that you can kind of keep about for a little while at home.
So I don't ever want to hear about anyone having to buy sugar syrup again because
this is so easy and so much cheaper than that.
And then you can use it as a base for other, you know,
quite just a simple base for some other syrups as well.
So for instance, if you stick some tea leaves or you know Earl Grey tea
or some kind of green tea or something like that in there
overnight then you'll have an Earl Grey syrup or a green tea syrup.
Something like some pink peppercorns if you give that a little like little pound and then pop them
in overnight then that kind of infuses in there. As well you can pop some vanilla in there and that
works really well for something like an Espresso Martini, so either you know just split a vanilla
pod and pop it in, which you can reuse a few times because obviously vanilla is very expensive, so
not suggesting that you should that you should use just the pod just the once, or you can get
sort of little vanilla paste bottles from your supermarkets and things like that and
just pop a little half a teaspoon in there too and that just gives a really nice kind of warm
and quite fragrant syrup to use in a lot of classics that normally just call for simple syrup.
But as it is, it's really the simple secret to a lot of cocktail success.
Simple Syrup, so now you know.