welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen and a little series I'm calling
cocktails 101 and this is all of those things in the background that you might
need in order to actually build really good cocktails and today I'm going to
make gum syrup although it's spelled usually in the French gum spirit and it
uses gum arabic now gum arabic is something that is fairly readily
available although there are two kinds there's the gum arabic that you buy for
painting and art supplies it's probably not edible it might be edible but
oftentimes it's cut with other things that you don't want to consume and then
there's the food grade stuff and that's what I've got here and you can get that
usually at a really good baking store although there's always online so I'm
gonna put four tablespoons of gum arabic and you know you don't have to be super
exact with these measurements four tablespoons and over here I'm boiling a
little bit of water now just as this comes to a boil I want
to pour off a quarter cup and then I'm gonna add that to the gum arabic now we
need to whisk this in so gum arabic is really hard to dissolve so we whisk this
as much as we can with the hot water and then we're going to set this aside for
two and a half three hours maybe even three and a half of four hours until the
gum arabic is completely dissolved and then we're gonna move on to the next
step okay so the gum arabic looks to be fully dissolved at this point now we
need to make a rich syrup so a rich syrup is two parts sugar to one part
water and the best way to do this of course is by weight but because we're
using sort of white granulated sugar that stuff that comes out of the bag the
table sugar that everyone in north america has it is so close to being
exactly the same between weight and volume that
volume is fine so I'm gonna do a cup of sugar and a half a cup of water in this
pot on low heat now we don't want to bring this up to a boil you just want to
bring this gently up to the point where the sugar is fully dissolved and the
liquid goes completely clear now we just mix in the dissolved gum arabic and just
stir it in until it's fully incorporated and the mixture is clear again or clear
ish it's going to have a little bit of color that the gum arabic brings to it
but it shouldn't be too cloudy and so that's gum syrup it's kind of an
interesting thing you see it less and less in cocktail recipes today you go
back to cocktail recipes sort of pre-prohibition and you see it a lot
more but over time it's just switched to simple syrup instead of using gum syrup
so when we get into making cocktails I'm going to use a lot of this in the
cocktails in the early version and then compare what it tastes like with just
using simple syrups so we'll do a side-by-side comparison of these
cocktails now sugar is a preservative this is a simple syrup this will last in
your fridge six to eight weeks without any trouble you will start to see after
about the eight week point you might start to notice a little bit of mold
growing on the side that's the case toss it don't keep it around and make sure
you write on the bottle what it is and the date that you made it thanks for
stopping by see you again soon
you