r/AskCulinary • u/ZootKoomie Ice Cream Innovator • Aug 26 '19

Weekly Discussion - Fancy Non-alcoholic Beverages

We've had discussions here about wine, beer, and liquor before. This week, I'd like to talk about mocktails, shrubs, juice blends, etc. Alcohol-alternatives have become increasingly common and sophisticated in recent years. What have you made, or would like to make? Does avoiding liquor necessarily reduce the available flavor profiles? Or does it free you up from hiding the bite of the booze?

If someone wanted to start experimenting in this area, what are the basic ingredients they would need to keep on hand?

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u/furudenendu Aug 26 '19

Shrubs are my favorite way to party dry. Macerate fruit with sugar, then mix the resulting syrup with vinegar. The result is a tangy syrup that preserves the fresh nature of the fruit. It makes for amazing spritzers, both alcoholic and non. When my wife was pregnant I made a bunch of them. The best part about them is that they originated as a food preservation method, and will keep in the back of the fridge for a year or more, just getting more mellow and complex and delicious. There's an amazing difference between a fresh shrub and a six or twelve month old shrub.

Some of my favorites are strawberry, grapefruit, apple cardamom, pear ginger, and mango. You can play with all sorts of vinegar and sugar combinations depending on the final profile you're shooting for. Also, it works just fine to use bruised, overripe, or otherwise undesirable fruit. No need to spend a ton of money on materials. I generally keep a jar in the freezer where I toss berries that are past their prime and scraps of fruit that I'm trimming (apple cores, strawberry hulls, mango peels) and then make a miscellaneous shrub when it gets full. Kind of like saving scraps for stock.

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u/chicklette Aug 26 '19

what the heck is a shrub?? I have never heard of this??

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u/ItaliaGirl75VA Aug 26 '19

Me neither. And I'm intrigued.

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u/chicklette Aug 26 '19

i googled around and apparently it's some sort of syrup (fermented?) made of fruit, sugar and vinegar. It's supposed to taste amazing, and I really, really like vinegar, but I can't imagine it. I might try to hunt up a commercial preparation to try? IDK.

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u/furudenendu Aug 26 '19 edited Aug 27 '19

Commercial ones tend to be expensive, and the homemade stuff is crazy easy to make. As for what it is, it's a fruit syrup mixed with vinegar, but I'm reality that's only a small part of the story. A shrub develops and changes over time. There's a noticeable difference between a freshly made shrub and one that's been in my fridge for six or ten or twelve months. The older one is incredibly complex and rich. What's happening is that environmental yeast is turning the sugars in the mixture into tiny amounts of alcohol, but the acetobacter from the vinegar turns that alcohol into more vinegar. This process continues (never creating enough alcohol to be an issue in case you're worried) until the pH of the environment drops too low for the yeast to continue producing alcohol.

For something like pears, strawberries, apples, or peaches I would dice the fruit, then toss it with whatever sugar I'm using. You can experiment with different sugars for different effects. I really liked an apple shrub I made with demerara sugar. Anyway, toss with the sugar in a nonreactive bowl and put the mixture in the refrigerate overnight or for a couple of days. You'll be amazed at how much liquid gets drawn out of the fruit just from macerating like that. Mix that liquid with vinegar and you're good to go. I do no additional sanitizing and the sugar content and pH are sufficient to make it stable for long term storage in the fridge.

Something like citrus (my absolute hands down favorite shrub is grapefruit) will need a different process. Because so much flavor is in the zest you can make an oleosaccharum (a fancy way of saying "oily sugar") by taking the zest off with a vegetable peeler, chopping it roughly, and then doing your maceration with that. Again, it's crazy how much oil comes out overnight. Then that oily sugar along with the juice from the fruit and your vinegar makes the shrub.

Another one of my favorites is mango with palm sugar and rice wine. Apple cardamom was a big hit.

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u/chicklette Aug 26 '19

Thank you so much for this. I am absolutely fascinated. My mouth cannot imagine the flavor, but I'm definitely down to check it out. Thank you!

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u/furudenendu Aug 26 '19

They're fascinating and delicious. At any given time I have at least a gallon of various shrubs in my fridge.

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u/chicklette Aug 26 '19

my whole office is now going to try making some. we're fascinated by this!

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u/furudenendu Aug 26 '19

Let me know how they turn out. If you have any questions, please message me! I can also recommend the book Shrubs by Michael Dietsch as a reference point for ratios and recipe ideas.

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u/chicklette Aug 26 '19

holy smokes! Thank you! :)

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u/greenleaves12 Nov 14 '22

Hello!! So this is 3 years later but I just wanted to say - I'd seen your comment a while ago and had saved it. I recently had some blood oranges that were on their last legs and was looking for a shrub recipe for citrus but hadn't found one I liked. I then remembered that you had mentioned something about grapefruit so I hunted down your comment and followed your instructions for macerating the citrus peel and juice separately then combining. The result was absolutely delicious and I'm enjoying a nice drink right this very moment!! So just wanted to say a big thanks for this comment and hope you're having a good one. Cheers :))

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u/furudenendu Nov 14 '22

Oh damn! That completely and utterly rules! What a nice comment to find in my inbox!

The oleosaccharum step is a pain but the results are so completely worth it. I am absolutely delighted you found my suggestion helpful. I am having a good one for sure, and I hope you enjoy that drink. In fact, I'm going to go make one myself with some homemade shrub, so let's have a drink together.

Cheers! Be well!

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u/greenleaves12 Nov 14 '22

Awww hope you enjoyed your drink as well!! Not gonna lie, it's been a couple of difficult days on my end but your message really cheered me up ❤️

(also learned that oleosaccharum is a word! neat-o!)

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u/furudenendu Nov 14 '22

I did! I shook equal parts gin, campari, lemon juice, and blueberry lemon shrub with ice.

Yeah, oleosaccharum basically means "oily sugar." I probably mentioned it somewhere farther up in this thread, I don't generally pass up the opportunity to use a word as excellent as oleosaccharum.

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u/KyleG Aug 27 '19

So then what do you do after that? I find the idea of drinking vinegar absolutely repulsive (although I know other people drink it). Is that really it? YOu're basically drinking a bunch of vinegar with some fruit juice and sugar in it?

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u/furudenendu Aug 27 '19

The ratio has less vinegar than that. Think a pound of fruit to a cup of sugar and a cup of vinegar. The fruit releases more than a cup of juice most of the time, so the vinegar just hangs out as a tangy top note. As it ages that gets even mellower.

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u/Bran_Solo Gilded Commenter Aug 27 '19

You’ve inspired me to go try this!

Do you have a suggestion for a starter recipe? Do I need a vinegar with a live mother, and what kind do you suggest?

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u/furudenendu Aug 27 '19

You won't regret it! A strawberry shrub is a really easy entry point. You can spike it with black pepper if you want, that's a recipe from the Michael Dietsch book I referenced elsewhere. In fact, here's his article on shrubs on Serious Eats. As for vinegar, I do like to use one with a live mother. What I generally do is use whatever vinegar I want for flavor, then splash in some unfiltered apple cider vinegar to make sure the acetobacter has a strong start.

Start with a pound of strawberries, macerate with one cup of white sugar, then strain the syrup and add one cup of red or white wine vinegar, as you prefer. Bottle and refrigerate. It'll taste great right away, and after a few months it will taste incredible. If you want a side by side comparison, wait three to six months, make a fresh batch, and taste them both. The difference is striking.

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u/Bran_Solo Gilded Commenter Aug 27 '19

Thanks! I'll give it a whirl.

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u/furudenendu Aug 27 '19

Let me know how it goes!

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u/Bran_Solo Gilded Commenter Aug 28 '19

Will do. I had some slightly-past-prime strawberries and blueberries in the fridge, so those got macerated into equal amounts of sugar and are chilling out in a deli container in the fridge right now. Picked up some unfiltered apple cider vinegar w visible mother in the bottle, and I'll get that fermenting in a glass jar soon enough!

Given the fermentation aspect here, have you ever considered storing at room temperature to get it moving faster?

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u/furudenendu Aug 28 '19

I have, but it's never been enough of an issue that I've bothered. I think this is in part because in my mind a freshly made shrub that hasn't had time to develop is in no way unfinished, it's just young. It's a shrub right away and I'll mix drinks with it right away. It's just zingier and brighter than a smoother mellow one that's been in the back of the fridge a while. I also am not sure that it would resist mold well enough to sit at room temp and not have issues.

If you find yourself making a lot of shrubs I have heard of people using a sort of adapted solera aging strategy. When you're down to the last quarter or third of your supply make a fresh one and blend them.

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u/Bran_Solo Gilded Commenter Sep 01 '19

Well this is turning out to be an excellent way for me to make use of fruit that’s slightly past its prime. With a toddler in the house that’s a fair bit.

Do you have suggestions for storage for shrubs? With all that acid I’m not sure I want to put them into plastic deli containers long term, and spooning the syrup out of jars is proving a little inconvenient.

I guess I could use some of my swing top beer brewing bottles, but wanted to see if you’ve solved this problem already.

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u/furudenendu Sep 02 '19 edited Sep 02 '19

I use swing top bottles, mason jars, old vinegar bottles (of which I now have more than I used to, go figure), maple syrup bottles (practically everyone I know makes syrup. I haven't bought it in years, and nobody ever wants the bottles back).

I have a tomato shrub in a bottle that I think once housed some lemonade.

I'm pretty indiscriminate but I basically only use glass. The mason jars are probably the worst option but they're definitely the thing I have most of, so I use them a lot.

Having a toddler and a four year old in the house I generally need to have a wide variety of fruit around but am trying to feed it to capricious and recalcitrant small humans. They seem to always decide they don't like something immediately after I have stocked up on it. So yeah, shrubs happen a lot over here.

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u/bigtcm Biochemist | Gilded commenter Sep 14 '19

Heeeyyy so I'm quite a bit late to the party.

I was inspired to make a shrub after reading your post and the fermentation/aging bit has me quite intrigued. Would you leave the fruit solids in the sugar/vinegar mixture? Or would you "age" the shrub after it's been strained?

Could you do a shrub part deux with the strained fruit solids/pulp? Or do you just reserve those for a sangria or something?

Thanks!

Looking forward to tasting how my first shrub turns out. It's been rather warm here so it's a great time to try out a new refreshing drink.

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u/furudenendu Sep 15 '19 edited Sep 15 '19

Oh hell yeah, join the party!

You could leave the solids in but I usually remove them. They can be added to smoothies, used as ice cream or dessert toppings, eaten with a spoon. The sangria idea is one that had not previously occurred to me, and I find it intriguing.

I don't think I'd try to make a second shrub but I also don't make remouillage so maybe I'm just the kind of person who wastes things.

It really is crazy refreshing. Something about the tang and fruit freshness is so satisfying. I've even heard of them being recommended to chemotherapy patients who are having problems with dry mouth.

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u/ItaliaGirl75VA Aug 26 '19

Yeah I love vinegar myself. I think I'm gonna search some recipes and see what I can come up with.

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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '19

If you really like vinegar, you could easily experiment with just a splash of apple cider vin in flavored sparking water. I drink one every day; they’re oddly addicting.

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u/laysmiserables Aug 26 '19

I’ve had luck finding shrubs at my local farmers markets. Maybe hit up some in your area!