Tonic Syrup

Sorry for the hiatus. Time has just gotten away from me. I still have been cooking and taking pictures! During this time, I was making Tonic Syrup. I decided to make this because I found my favorite drink to make with my limoncello is a mix of tonic, bitters and limoncello. Now I made the bitters and the limoncello, so all I needed to do was make tonic! I happened to come across this recipe a while back and squirreled it away for the future. Guess the future has come. 

According to the recipe, I had most of the ingredients from making bitters. The main ingredient in bitters is cinchona bark, from Peru. It is a natural source of quinine - what is used to treat malaria. There's your factoid for the day. The lavender was a gift from my friend Lori. I did have to order citric acid from amazon. I couldn't find fresh lemongrass but had dried from my travels to Bali.

Basically take all the ingredients, put in a pan with water and boil. Cool, then put in a jar in the fridge for a week.

Strain out the solids. Put the strained liquid in another jar and put in fridge for a week.

Then strain off liquid. There's a muddy brown sludge at the bottom of the jar, you don't want that. Then add rich syrup in equal measure to the liquid. Rich syrup is 2x sugar to water. You can use turbinado sugar to make your syrup or regular sugar. I used regular sugar. 

I found that you can add a few ounces to a liter of sparkling water (I use a Soda Stream) and that's enough. Very tasty but not really like tonic. There are a lot of complex flavors going on and it ended up being too sweet when added to the limoncello. When making this again, if my goal was to add it to something sweet like limoncello, I would use only regular simple syrup not rich syrup. But that doesn't mean I can't find something to drink this with...I found that mixed with bourbon it was delightful.

Now, not to waste the citrus that I zested, I juiced them (with carrots):

That day, I also happened to be in a waste not, want not type of mood. So I found a recipe to use the pulp from the juicer. Will let you know what I did with that at a later date...