How to Make Cherry Syrup

Today we're making black cherry syrup, not to be confused with wild cherry syrup, which was the more popular syrup at the soda fountain, often found in the wild cherry phosphate. Black cherry syrup was used in combination with other syrups like strawberry and pineapple to create unique flavor combinations. It can still be used on its own and it makes a good soda, but its strength is the color and the flavor working with other flavors. It only requires four ingredients, a couple optional if you want to store it for any length of time, so super easy to make, stick around I'll show you how to make it. The first ingredient is black cherries, you're going to need about 750 grams of them, a quart and a quarter, just because they have the stones in them and you're going to compensate for that weight if you're using fresh cherries with the pits still in them. If you take the pits out, use one quarter or 675 grams and you can use frozen cherries for this, it will work just fine. Some people crack a few stones in this and that will release some benzaldehyde, it has an almond-like flavor, and it will also release a little bit of cyanide, not enough to hurt you, but it will leave a very subtle bitter flavor. You can skip that step if you want, it's not important, but historically they used to put the cherries through the roller and it would crack a fair number of the stones, so that was the flavor they were looking for. Now beyond the cherries, you're going to need one cup of sugar, 500 ml of hot water, I've pre-boiled mine, and then you're going to need 1100 grams of sugar to finish off the syrup, and 10 to 12 grams of malic acid, but if you don't have malic acid, which is a natural acid in cherries, you can use citric acid, it will be fine. If you want to help preserve it, ascorbic acid will work, that is vitamin C, and you can also use potassium sorbate, now potassium sorbate is a natural preservative, it's actually so important to the food chain that it is actually what helped create this worldwide food chain, without it, things would ferment all the time. First we're just going to move all these cherries into a two quart pot, you can remove the stems or you can leave them on, it's not going to make a big deal, and then what you're going to do is add sugar to the cherries, and then we're going to muddle that, you can smash it up however you want, but cherries are firmer than strawberries, and I suspect it will make a bit of a mess, so just do the best you can, the sugar will help absorb a lot of the splatter, but get these broken down so that this process goes a little bit faster. Now once your berries are smashed, or crushed, simply put them on the stove top, any heater, I'm using an induction burner, and you're going to add 500 ml of hot water. Now this step is actually a pasteurization step, and all you need to do is heat it up to 72 degrees Celsius, that's 162 Fahrenheit, for one minute, two minutes, and allow it to cool. So I'm just going to turn on the burner and bring it up to that temperature, 72 degrees for a minute or two is going to kill all the pathogens, except for fungus, but we're going to use pH adjustment with the acidity, though cherries should be acidic enough that it will inhibit fungal growth. Once it gets up to 72 degrees, we're going to take it off the heat and let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes, this takes a little bit longer than strawberries because cherries are a little bit firmer, so they need a little bit more maceration time at this temperature. So now that we've let it macerate for 15 minutes, you can let it go 20 minutes, 25, even a half an hour, but the nice thing is once we get it strained, the liquid will still be a little bit warm, and when we add the sugar, it will dissolve quicker, but if you want a stronger flavor, you may be able to extract a little bit more, but there is a maximum amount of flavor that you can extract from cherries, and this is probably about it, or maximum amount you can extract from any fruit. So I just line a strainer with some cheesecloth, and then allow this to slowly drain. Now that's how much free-run juice we've extracted, but if you need to extract a little bit more, because again, you want to get up to one liter of liquid, or one quart, you can just take your hot water and pour it over your cherries, make sure it just doesn't run out the sides, but that will help extract a little more juice, and the hot water is the best because it does extract sugars, it dissolves them better, but that's the way they used to do it at the Soda Fountain. Do not press this, it will make your syrup very cloudy. You're always going to get a slight haze, that's from pectin. If you want to clear that up, you can filter it, or you can use pectinase, which is an enzyme, which will break down the pectin, and clear it up. You can get all these things at your local homebrew store, often used in wine to clarify wine. So once you have your quart or liter of liquid, we're just going to pour that right back into the pot. Now it will be a little bit hot, it's probably about 50 degrees, but one thing I should do is check the pH for you. This is just to make sure that we are below 4, 4.6 I believe is the actual number, but they do recommend a little bit lower. So we're just going to stick the pH probe in. So the pH of this is 3.38, so 3.4, which is perfectly good for leaving as is. There won't be any botulism in it, the pH is too low for that. But you might want to make it a little bit lower, because it's a little bit, it doesn't have that sparkle or the acidity that something like lemon or lime would have. It tends to be a little bit flat, and that's one of the reasons people don't just make cherry juice drinks or cherry syrup drinks, they don't seem to be acidic enough, but we're going to fix that with malic acid. So now what we do is we just simply pour this in. Again, it is fairly warm, hot enough to touch, not hot enough to burn. Set that over there, and then we're just going to add all of the sugar. Then simply stir this until it is dissolved. If you've allowed this to sit for like a couple hours, which you can do, it's not going to affect the flavor. But it's cooled down, you can add it back to the burner, but I'd recommend not heating it up above 50 degrees Celsius. There's no real need to, there's never any reason to boil this stuff. It just drives off flavor, and it adds a bit of a cooked flavor. The fresh cherry syrup is what people like, so the longer you cook these things, the more of this cooked flavor it has, and it becomes less appealing. The sugar's dissolving, we can add our malic acid. You can weigh this if you want, I just use a tablespoon, it gets pretty close. So you're looking for 10 to 12 grams. You can adjust this however you like, so you can use less, you can use more. You can find malic acid at your local homebrew store or online, and if you don't have malic acid, which is the natural acid in cherries, you can use citric acid, it will come out fine. And you simply dump it in, and stir. So one thing you might notice is when you add the acid, there's going to be a subtle color change. It's going to become a brighter red instead of that dark cherry red. That's pretty normal, that just happens with a lot of plants that have high pigment colors, is that pH affects them, so they'll often get lighter or darker depending on the pH of the solution. In this case, the lower the pH, the more red this becomes. Now if you want to protect that red color, you add some vitamin C or ascorbic acid, again it'll adjust the acidity just a bit, not much, but it will also act as an antioxidant to protect your color and freshness of this. So basically one gram per liter seems to be sufficient. Now the last step is preservation. You don't need to do this step if you're making this stuff fresh and using it within like a couple days and you're keeping it in the refrigerator. I'd say this will last at most a week in the refrigerator, fermentation will start. Even though it's got so much sugar in it, certain yeasts just seem to be able to ferment in those conditions, and you'll find your bottles will start to pop if you don't do anything about it. Now I use potassium sorbate, you can get this again at wine stores or home brew stores. It's used in a lot of products. Wine is one of those products that uses it frequently, especially sweet wines, because if they don't stop the yeast from fermenting, they can't maintain sugar in wine. Now it is considered a natural product, it is isolated from berries. I usually add one gram for a batch, which is roughly a liter and a half. So if you're doing this mathematically, it would be half a gram per liter up to one gram per liter. It is very effective in very small amounts, so you don't need to add a lot of it. But I do recommend you dissolve it in a little bit of cold water before you add it to this. It just will work better. Dissolves really quickly, you'll end up with a slightly yellow solution, and then just dump it in. So after adding the potassium sorbate, this has a longer shelf life, but it does not have an infinite shelf life. So I'd still recommend keeping it in the fridge and using it within one to two months. This is what your black cherry syrup looks like. It's pretty much perfectly clear, there is a little bit of haze to it, you're going to get that with these. You can filter it and do some clarification techniques if you really want perfectly clear syrups. So I will be using this in the near future in what are called Italian Lemonades, though they have an interesting history. They're probably a precursor to Italian sodas, though they incorporate a lot of wine in them. So it's these fruit syrups with wine and soda water. So they're much different than the Italian sodas we know today, but do try to make this. It tastes delicious, it's different than other cherry syrups with the acidity, really gives it some sparkle, and the flavor is wonderful. So thanks for watching, I will see you in the next one.