Pomegranate Liqueur
Source of Recipe
Bette Joyce Faulkner Fleming from internet
Recipe Introduction
Pomegranates should be as ripe and red as you can get them. Too young, and the flavor may be weak. Too old, and they will, of course, already be rotten. Larger pomegranates are preferred, if only for yield. I generally get 12 ounces of juice (separate from the pulp) for each pair of pomegranates. If your fruit yields much less than that, toss in another one or so, so you get about 12 ounces of juice total. If unsure, err on the side of plenty. I've run with as much as 16 ounces.
List of Ingredients
• 2 large pomegranates, pods only
• 1 1/2 cups vodka
• 3/4 cups sugar
• 3/8 cups water
• 1/2 peel, lemon, scraped
Recipe
Remove pods from pomegranates. Throw away rind and pith. Press out all the juice with a good, sturdy press. Put the resulting juice and pulp in a 1-liter mason jar (any glass jar you can effectively seal works; I use Arc jars from France, and Fidenza jars from Italy). Prepare lemon peel, toss in jar. Add vodka. Seal jar.
Steep two weeks (though I have left it as much as four with no ill effects), turning it over once a day. Strain and filter. Squeeze the pulp moderately hard, but realize that the harder you squeeze, the harder will be the job of filtering later on. It's a tough balance to make.
Now, boil the sugar and water together. Let stand a moment to cool. Add syrup to mixture, and seal quickly. Age another month. Remove, filter again, bottle. You should note that there's a thick haze or sludge on the bottom of your jar, and you will find it incredibly difficult to filter out with anything but a serious wine filter. Instead, you might consider racking the liqueur (siphoning the good liqueur off the top, and discarding the sludge on the bottom). You lose a little bit of liquid along with the sludge, but you sure save yourself a lot of work filtering.
Yield: Total liquid (1.5 cups vodka, .75 cups syrup, 1.5 cups pomegranate juice) 3.75 cups. Proof: about 35.
The Long Story:
As I said at the top, traditionally I had great difficulty in pressing the pods. I had tried various ways of breaking them by hand (in bags or in cheesecloth), and crushing them (wooden spoons and a potato ricer are among the casualties of that exercise), and never really succeeded. It's worth noting that the first success I had, which led me down this long road, was done without crushing the pods. I guess I just got lucky. But I forgot what I had done.
The very first experiment I made was with one pomegranate worth of pods in a cup-and-a-half of vodka. It was clearly too thin, so I made another try, with twice as much pomegranate, and a little lemon peel for variety. This one, magically, was the great one. For the next four years, every autumn I took another shot at pomegranate liqueur, and failed. Thankfully, I already knew what the good recipe was, the so-called "#2" recipe. I had to keep hoping the planets would someday be in alignment again.
One summer, with the advent of the press, I had great hopes for success. So we set up five varieties, numbered "3" through "7". I decided that if I didn't get something good out of this round, I never would, so this was in danger of being my last-ever attempt at pomegranate. I certainly wasn't going to miss peeling the fruit, though. Anyway, the basic recipe for these five experiments were the same as above. The major distinction was that, since now I could squeeze the pods effectively, I didn't know whether I should keep or discard the pulp, that aggregation of skin, seed and the like.
For "3", we retained the pulp, adding it back into the jar after pressing out the juice. By accident, we also used a whole lemon's worth of peel. For "4", we also used a whole lemon (may as well be consistent, if not careful), but discarded the pulp. We stopped work then, and waited a week for more pomegranates and another Saturday to blow. "5", then, was the normal half-lemon, with the pulp retained, and "6" was half a lemon and no pulp. "7" was a bit odd. I had a lot of left-over juice from the first pair of attempts, which had been languishing in a jar in my fridge, waiting for me to decide how much to sweeten it for straight drinking. Although pomegranate juice is delicious when lightly sweetened, I decided at last to toss the juice into one final experiment. Against 2 3/4 cups of juice, I put 2 cups of vodka and 1 cup of syrup - no lemon peel.
Weeks later, the results were in. "4" and "6" were decidedly insipid. The pulp seems to be very important in making a fuller and more robust flavor (tannic acid, my guess). The lemon peel didn't seem to make that much difference in the end, though I'm selecting 1/2 peel just on principle (so many other recipes call for 1/2 lemon peel). "7", like "4" and "6", had no skins to contribute the tannic acid, and was, several months later, a similar failure. I wish I had drank it as juice instead.
So, after all these years, I finally have a delicious, consistent recipe for pomegranates. And it all came down to having the right tools. And all my friends who asked for bottles after the tasting will just have to wait until the next time the crop of pomegranates comes in.
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