“Assume Nothing!” A mantra for The Crown as we worked towards opening our doors in March of 2019, the phrase became a Menu section, encouraging our visitors to drop their preconceptions and be open to new and delicious experiences. And now it’s the title of a recipe series, for you to recreate at home. Here’s to a year of assuming nothing!
Passion Fruit Syrup
A sweet and tart syrup base for sodas and cocktails.
Ingredients:
- 8 ounces sugar (~1 cup)
- 8 ounces water (~1 cup)
- 1 1/2 cups passion fruit pulp (about 6 passion fruits)
Directions:
Cut the passion fruit in half, and use a spoon to scoop the sweet, juicy seed sacs out of the rind and into a container. Set aside.
Add equal parts sugar and water to a small saucepan and bring the mixture to a boil. Keep the simple syrup at a boil over high heat for 5 minutes.
Add the passion fruit pulp and cook, stirring for another minute to heat the seed sacs to the point of rupturing. As soon as they have, remove the mixture from heat and put the pot in a cold water bath to quickly cool it down.
At this point you can either strain the syrup with a fine mesh sieve and cheesecloth for a clear, pale orange syrup, or keep both the seeds and syrup together for a more textural syrup.
Refrigerate or freeze the syrup to store. Good for 6 weeks in the fridge or 6 months in the freezer
To make a delicious passion fruit soda, add 1 oz of syrup to 8oz of sparkling water and pour over ice. For a more intense and sweet drink, just add more syrup!
Description:
Passion fruit is a large, oval-shaped pepo – a type of berry with a hard rind. It grows on a flowering vine native to the South American tropics, but which is widely cultivated in tropical regions across the globe. It typically has a soft, yellow or purple leathery rind, and each fruit contains about two hundred and fifty small seeds that are contained within a pulp of membranous juice sacs. In flavor, the passion fruit has a delicately sweet and slightly musky taste, with a pleasant acidic backbone. It is delicious, aromatic, and produces a gorgeous yellow-orange juice.
When the fruit came into season, we scooped up about forty pounds of the tasty and slightly smaller purple variety from the market, intending to make a drink that would preserve them for some time, as the delicate fruit ripens and spoils fairly quickly when fresh.
We experimented with turning the fruit directly into a syrup, but the high temperatures involved in making a syrup destroyed a lot of the delicate aroma and changed the vibrant orange color to a caramel brown. In order to preserve the flavor, color, and aroma of the delicious fruit, we decided to make a concentrated simple syrup and then add the passion fruit pulp, cooking them together just long enough for the sacs to rupture, and then rapidly cooling the syrup in an ice bath.
The result was a delightful, bright syrup, which we added to sparkling water and served over ice for a sweet and refreshing tropical soda.
