REDCURRANT CORDIAL
I’ve never known what to do with redcurrants and have always tended to give them away or do nothing with them. However, this year John had the brilliant idea of experimenting with making cordial as a replacement for the grape/apple juice we buy to mix with soda.
We actually made 3 versions and then did a blind taste test to see which one we preferred:
The first contained 100% sugar, the second contained 50% sugar and 50% sweetener and the third contained 100% sweetener.
Completely unexpectedly, the one that we both preferred was the one with 100% sweetener as you were able to get the full redcurrant taste.
Redcurrant Cordial
For this recipe, you need something to strain the fruit from the juice and for this I used the Jelly & Jam Strainer Stand & Muslin Bag that I’d bought from Lakeland.
Rather than using sugar to sweeten the cordial, we decided to use an artificial, low-calorie sweetener containing Eritritol and Sucralose that we bought in the Spanish supermarket Mercadona in Spain .
INGREDIENTS
- 1 kg redcurrants
- 800 ml water
- sugar or sweetener
METHOD
- Wash the redcurrants and remove any stalks or leaves.
- Put them in a large stainless steel saucepan and add the water.
- Bring to the boil, cover with a lid and simmer for about ten minutes.
- Leave to cool.
- Transfer the currants and juice to a jam strainer and leave to strain.
- Measure the amount of juice obtained.
- If you are using sweetener, calculate 50g for every 570 ml of juice.
- Put the juice and sweetener back in the saucepan and bring to the boil.
- Boil for 10 minutes.
- Transfer to bottles and leave to cool completely before putting in the freezer until needed.