Home Made Syrups

Okay, I have a confession to make...sigh...I used to be a really, really, crappy bartender, and not just because I was new at it, I was crap for a long time. I NEVER tasted the drinks I sent out, I knew nothing about the ingredients I was using and I thought muddling was really really stupid, why muddle when you can just buy a premix? right? (insert vomiting sound effect).

Whew! It feels good to get that off my chest.

Anyway, after I came to my senses, one of the first mental hurdles that I had to overcome was the notion that I could make my own syrups for cocktails. Believe it or not, you don't need a factory and a sugar cane plantation to make a fancy pants syrup of your cocktails, or your coffees, your sodas, or desserts. My eyes were opened on this subject, as well as many others by Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz's fantastic cocktail tome The Art of the Bar. They convinced me that I could, and should, make ginger syrup, which turned out to be easy. Ginger syrup lead to cocktails like the Ginger Rogers, hotted up Moscow Mules, and eventually brewing my own ginger beer. 

You'll have to go buy the book to get the exact ginger syrup recipe but any flavored syrup is just infused simple syrup. The first one of my own that I tried involved one of the few fruits we had in the walk in that wasn't a lemon or lime, pears. The kitchen uses them in an awesome salad with stilton cheese and candied pecans, so I pilfered one and headed out front to the bar, hot plate and pot in hand.

Pear Syrup

2 cups white sugar

2 cups water 

1 whole pear (washed)

Okay, don't jump ahead here, to make pear syrup, we must make simple syrup, which is, well, simple. Mix two cups of sugar with two cups of water in a pot and simmer and stir until all the sugar is dissolved, voila, simple syrup. Next, cut the pear into thin slices, try to keep them looking nice and uniform because we can use them later, and put them in the simmering simple syrup. Again, don't get ahead of yourself, don't cut the pear until you have the simple syrup ready or you'll end up with brown pear slices and dingy looking syrup AND, leave the skin on the pear, it'll give the syrup some colour.

Well, you're pretty much done, just let the pot simmer gently for half an hour or so then let the syrup cool and strain it into an old wine or booze bottle, keep it capped when not in use and it'll keep for a couple of weeks.

Now hopefully you didn't throw away those pear slices yet because we're gonna make garnish with them. If you are lucky enough to have access to a dehydrator, then just spread the slices out on the rack and press on, in a couple hours you'll have some tasty pear chips you can float on top of cocktails or perch in an egg-white foam, or you can just eat them. If you don't have a dehydrator then fear not. Just lay the slices out on a piece of foil or parchment paper over a cookie sheet and stick them in the oven on a very low setting overnight, this works just as well. If you're doing this in a restaurant/bar, just make sure you leave a note for whomever opens the kitchen otherwise they will crank the oven up to full as soon as they come in and you'll be left with little wheels of soot.

Cheers.