Thirsty in summer?

Anna Blume in Berlin...that's where I took my first sip of rhabarber schorle and loved it! If I had to choose, that would be my favourite schorle. By wikipedia: "Schorle is a German beverage made from diluting juice or wine with carbonated water."  And by the way, if you are ever in Berlin you should definitely pay Cafe Anna Blume a visit.

Sadly, I can't buy a good rhubarber juice here in Switzerland so I or my friends have been buying it for me in Germany where it's available at the bio store. Unfortunately I drive very seldom to Germany and now my best importer doesn't live in Switzerland anymore ;D Well, it's a rhubarber time now so why not to make the juice myself, specially because I can by the rhubarber from the village farmer. So here's what I needed:

Rhubarber juice

1 kg rhubarber cut into small pieces

1 l water

juice of 1 lemon

2 tbs dried hibiscus flower (for better colour)

...

400 g sugar (can be adjusted according to one's taste)

Place the rhubarber pieces with water, hibiscus and lemon juice into a pot. Bring to boil and let simmer for about 20 min. When ready pass the liquid through a cheesecloth. Add the desired amount of sugar and bring the juice to boil once more. When hot, bottle it into a very well washed and desinfected (I place the bottles to oven for about 15 min/85 celsius) bottles. Fill the bottles to the top and close the cap. With a right kind of cap you will create a vacuum inside the bottle. My bottles were filled to the top but as you can see in the photo they don't look full anymore. That's due to the right bottling technique which I learned from my mom. 

We are actually planning to by an extra freezer and fridge for the cellar. Then I could make more different kind of juices and have a place to store them. When I was a kid my mom always made so much juice (mainly red and black currant) that we had enough almost for the whole winter. She also froze blueberries, strawberries and raspberries and I can't remember that we had ever bought frozen berries from the shop during winter because we always had so much in the freezer.

Rhubarber juice and rhubarber schorle

The next drink, ginger beer, I learned to know in South Africa. It's a super summer drink. The Paupered chef blog has a nice text about a ginger beer. I didn't follow the recipe exactly, but the text gave me some ideas. I, as well as my hubby, love our ginger beer fiery so I need a good amount of ginger to make my ginger beer.

Ginger beer

2 l water

500 g ginger

juice of two lemons

300 g sugar

5 g yeast (or some old ginger beer as a starter)

I peeled the ginger partly but I didn't chop it by hand. Instead I used the lowest level of a blender and it worked out just fine that way. I placed the ginger, water, sugar and lemon juice into a pot and brought it to boil. When it startted to boil I took the pot from the stove and let it cool down on the table to about 40 celsius. Then I added the yeast (starter), covered the top with a lid and let it stand in the room temperature over night. All in all it stood about 15 hours until I bottled it and placed it to a fridge. Enjoy when cold, unless you want it to be lighly sparkly in which case you should wait for couple of days.

When I had my nice, selfmade ginger beer I could also give the drink Dark 'N' Stormy a try. In the recipe there stands sugar sirup. We made it ourself with 1 kg raw cane sugar to 1 litre of water.

Dark 'N' Stormy

6 cl dark rhum (didn't have the official one so used Negrita)

12 cl ginger beer

lime juice and a wedge

sugar sirup to taste

ice cubes

Dark 'N' Stormy

Woah, this became a long blog text. Well, don't get too used to it because tomorrow I'll start in the new job and then I probably won't have so much time to post. Hopefully Friedrich Peter's kitchen will be ready at some point and then we might hear more from him as well :D Now, I shall maybe enjoy one Dark 'N' Stormy to calm my nerves...new job! Apua!