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| Sorrel flowers |
Dec 21st, 2014
I bought a big bag of sorrel flowers at the fresh market on Saturday. The lady selling it and the group of ladies near her
all gave me advice on how to make sorrel drink. I needed bay leaf but didn't want to buy the
big bag she had for sale. The lady next to her gave me a big handful of her bay leaves for free saying "Merry Christmas." I did purchase a bag of cinnamon sticks. I thought I had the rest of the ingredients. It turned out I was missing all spice berries - two to be exact. A quick VHF radio call to sy Lady Annilla and Tom was buzzing over in the dinghy to retieve 2 all spice berries. Thanks Sofie.
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| Sorrel flower up close |
The first task was to clean the flowers. They were a fair number of ants in the bag with the flowers. Ants with flowers...shocking I know but I still don't like bugs of any sort. I soaked the flowers twice to get rid of them all.
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| Soaking them to get all the ants out |
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| 2 ginger slices, bay leaf, cinnamon stick, 2 cloves, 2 all spice, ground nutmeg |
The cleaned flowers went into the pressure cooker pot. Cinnamon stick, 2 cloves, 2 all spice berries, 1 by leaf, and two good sized ginger slices. Two local ladies at the Prickly Bay Tiki hut told me no ginger but other recipes said yes. I went with the yes. I also included a healthy grating of nutmeg. This is the isle of nutmeg. I poured bailing water over all that, stirred and then let it steep for several hours.
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| Pouring boiling water over the flowers and spices |
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| Steeping |
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| Much of the color gone |
Finally after 4-5 hours, the flowers had given off much of their color. Some recipes call for steeping overnight but others do not. I am too impatient but more importantly I really didn't think leaving a huge pot of
bright red,
staining red liquid on the galley stove overnight was smart.
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| Ruby red color |
Tom assisted me by making simple syrup - 2 cups of water and 2 cups of sugar. He heated the water and stirred in the sugar until it was all dissolved. This brought out the few escape ants that were hiding in the galley. Have I mentioned how much I dislike bugs of any sort? Argh!
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| 2 c water + 2 c sugar = Simply Syrup |
We strained the sorrel, squeezing the now soft flowers for all their liquid. We sampled it for a starting reference point and then added simple sugar to taste. We ended up using all the simple syrup Tom made. The sorrel drink is sweet but not too sweet and the spices come through.
We bottled it into two containers, making roughly 4 quarts.
It's cooling in the fridge now. It can be enjoyed straight or with a touch of rum added in.
The plan is to take it to an Xmas beach bonfire, grill up, potluck tomorrow afternoon to share.
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| Taste tester Tom |
Follow - Steve and Hope on s/v StarShine are long time cruising residents of Grenada. We shared our HR Version of sorrel at the beach potluck. They both declared it good and enjoyed a couple of servings each. Steve liked the fact that our version isn't overly sweet. Many versions of sorrel are way too sweet including the commercial versions. We declared our first attempt a success and have been enjoying it each day.
For recipe see blog posting
Sorrel
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