Hand Made Creole Shrubb

Follow @b_apothecary

[I’ve learned so much since this post and have distilled orange liqueurs, deconstructed commercial brands, tackled terpene science, learned about fixation, created best bets, discovered Joseph Merory’s recipes, and so much more!]

Hopefully I can add to this liqueur recipe as I get a chance to work on it, but writing things down will help me to analytically tackle things and create a functional, reproducible recipe.

The the six sour oranges that I bought (which were slightly larger than the ones I got earlier in the season from Specialty Produce) yielded 113.5 grams of peel un-dehydrated (micro planed with as little pith as possible). The peel is very unique and is sopping with moisture. I don’t own a dehydrater so I dried it out in a 200 f oven for 45 minutes or so spreading it across my non stick container to make it dry fast. The peel contained 80.4 grams of water which is 70.8% of the original weight! This leaves us with 33.1 grams to work with to make as much shrub as possible.

My strategy for seeing how many grams per liter a good shrubb takes will be to introduce it to an already sugared alcohol stock and keep increasing the amount until my tasting panel thinks we obtain comparable intensity. This may take quite a while as things need time to dissolve and integrate. The creole spices are another issue all together and I think the only way to really add them in a recipe for a liter batch is by adding a small calculated tincture.

A good spirit base is important for a good shrubb. Cointreau (not a shrubb I know) and clement’s creole shrubb both weigh in at 80 proof which means that with their massive amount of sugar they both start with something quite stiff. To figure out their sugar contents and gain a clue at what proof they start with I can sacrifice a cup or two of clement’s shrub and cook out the alcohol, refill the volume with distilled water and then get an unbiased refractometer reading [I developed so many other ways of doing this]. I think you could make a great version starting from an 80 proof spirit and I will probably have to make that concession. I would love to make a creole shrubb someday that used some of my favorites rums like St. James or Ron Barrellito for flavor contrast.

For the sensory evaluation, I think I’ll use a technique from Maynard Amerine’s Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation and provide three tasting samples, two that are alike, and an odd man out. The panel will try to differentiate my product from a commercial product in regards to orange intensity and hopefully it will be difficult because things will be the same. This means I have to use a similar base spirit for my test batch.

***update!***

So for this proof of concept batch I ended up using Bunratty’s potcheen (90 proof) that I got for free. It has a creepy banana aroma and basically says it was adulterated but it was free so it is hard to argue with.

The 750ml of 90 proof liquid weighed 703.7 grams to bring the sugar up to 38% by weight I had to add 432 grams of whole foods organic white sugar.

432g/(432+703.7)=.38 (this increases the volume to something like 1.1 liters or so.

then I added the 33.1 grams of orange peel… now we must be patient and let everything dissolve.

My educated guess is that if vermouth gets 28 grams per 3.8 liters of orange peels, 33.1 grams of orange peel may flavor quite a lot of creole shrub. Luckily this does make the recipe quite economical.

Amerine has a table in his Technology of Wine Making that shows how many pounds of oil you get per 100 pounds of most culinary spices and herbs. Oranges weigh in at 5lbs. which is fairly high relative to most other botanicals. Hopefully we can expect a nice creole shrubb yield.

What were only dreams will be Newman’s own creole shrubb.

Follow @b_apothecary