Jamaican · Drink
Sorrel
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, aromatics blooming from the first bite, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 250 g dried sorrel sepals, or 500 g fresh
- 2 litres water
- 60 g fresh ginger, sliced and bruised
- 8 g pimento berries
- 1 stick cinnamon
- 6 whole cloves
- pared peel of 1 orange
- 300 g sugar, or to taste
- 120 ml overproof white rum, optional
Equipment
Fine sieve
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rinse the sepals and pack them into a heatproof jar with the ginger, pimento, cinnamon, cloves and orange peel.
- Bring the water to a boil, pull it off the heat and let it stop bubbling, around 90C (195F), then pour it over. Cover and leave it alone.
- Strain through a cloth once the liquor is deep ruby and tastes tart and spiced, pressing only lightly.
- Let it cool, then stir in sugar to taste and the rum if using.
- Chill hard and serve over plenty of ice.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- It is the pour
- Also Right
- Serve alongside something salty and fried
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise
This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.
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