Cardamom Plum Iced Tea
Making your own simple syrup is a cooking skill that will take you far when it comes to crafting delicious drinks. The syrup in this recipe was created for iced tea, but you can use for cocktails or pour it over vanilla ice cream.
Submitted by: Geoff Marshall from Chicago, IL
Yield: 8 cups of tea and roughly 1 cup of infused syrup
Preparation Instructions:
To make syrup:
Slice plums in half, remove pits, and slice each plum into 6 wedges.
Gently crush cardamom pods with the side of a chef's knife, mortar and pestle, or the bottom of a sauté pan. You want to lightly crush the inner seeds so they will release their flavor more easily.
Add 1 1/4 cups of water and 1 cup of sugar to a small sauce pot. Turn heat on low and whisk until sugar is dissolved.
Add spices and sliced plums to the pot. Gently simmer for 20-30 minutes.
Remove from heat, and cool the syrup for a few minutes before straining through a fine mesh sieve. Store in a squeeze bottle or sealable container.
To make iced tea:
Bring 3 cups of water to a boil. (Keep 2 cups of cool water on the side.)
In a large pitcher, steep tea bags in hot water for 3 minutes.
Remove tea bags, add ice cubes and cool water. Store in refrigerator to keep cool and chill further.
To make one serving of flavored iced tea:
Combine 2-4 tablespoons of syrup with 2 cups of ice tea. Stir until syrup is dissolved.
Serve in a glass with ice, and garnish with slices of plum.
thespicehouse.com
More About This Recipe
Do not let the syrup boil. Small bubbles are perfect for this recipe. Too much heat could burn the sugar or turn the fruit to mush. You can also save the pieces of plum after you've made the syrup. This is essentially poached plums, perfect for serving as a garnish for desserts.
Hi Sofia,
That sounds delicious! Good call on reducing the sugar if the plums were sweet. The plums in our test kitchen were fairly tart. Adding the fruit pulp also sounds amazing.
As for shelf life, infused simple syrup should last up to six months in the fridge. With the added fruit, your version should last at least a month in a sealed container, kept in the fridge.
Made this today and I am very happy with the flavor but I did cut the sugar in half. The plums are so sweet and ripe on their own I couldn’t dump so much sugar over them. I poured the strained sauce into a pint size Mason jar then picked out the cardamom from the strained fruit, mashed it with a fork leaving it partially lumpy, and reintroduced it in to the sauce… I found it better that way.
One question I do have is, how long can I keep the plum sauce in the Mason jar in the fridge?