Homemade Grenadine

Photo by Eatnlisten from flickr

One of the things I want to do this summer is make more tiki drinks. They're fun, they're flavorful, and they help me get my RDA of fruit in an alcohol-laden manner. But they also often require ingredients that can be hard to find in good quality. Two of these ingredients, grenadine and falernum, are not hard to find as such. Rose's makes a grenadine that my local Harris Teeter carries, and there are several variations on falernum that are widespread. But these are not, as a rule, high quality ingredients. Both are not hard to make on your own, and so that's what I'm going to do.

Grenadine is really very easy to make, especially if you have a wife who likes Ramos Gin Fizzes and so keeps orange flower water laying around. It's just pomegranate juice, sugar, and the orange flower water, and the first two ingredients are ubiquitous. Orange flower water can be harder to find. My wife got ours at Ace Beverage. It should be available from specialty Mediterranean stores as well.

I actually mixed up the grenadine in a Pom Wonderful bottle, since it was half full, and that way I didn't need to find something to store it in. I used 2 parts pomegranate juice to one part sugar, and half an inch of orange flower water in the bottom. It's pretty good; sweet, naturally, but the flower water gives it a good floral quality balancing out the sweetness. Next time, I'll probably use a bit less flower water, since this batch was a bit herbaceous.