Meatless Monday – Shaved Ice and Flavors

One of the things that tell me summer has hit Manhattan, is the presence on every other corner of a man with a HUGE saddle shaped block of ice, a ice plane, and bottles of fruit syrup. For the minimal price of a dollar he will scrape out a cup of ice, dump it into a cone cup, and add a drizzle of fruit flavored syrup.

Is it sanitary? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it COLD? Oh, YES!. Is it REFRESHING? YES!. Is it just what you need on a hot humid day after a trip on a subway with no AC? ABSOLUTELY!!!

Now we can do this at home, expect those flavored syrups are kinda hard to come by. So IF we sort out how to make them, we have the keys to all kinds of snow cones, icee’s, fruit spritzers, fruit teas, and possibly a sorbet or so…

Simple syrup is the real heart to the best cold homemade beverages. Once make the syrup, you can add any fruit juice and create your own special summertime drinks.

There are several thicknesses of simple syrup and they have different uses. but for the purpose of this post will work with a thick simple syrup, a ratio of 1 part water to 1 part sugar, and is the basis of cold drinks.

A quick review of this from my Lemonade post says:

A basic sugar-and-water syrup used to make drinks at bars is referred to by several names, including simple syrup, sugar syrup, simple sugar syrup, gomme, and bar syrup.

Simple syrup is made by stirring granulated sugar into hot water in a sauce pan until the sugar is dissolved and then cooling the solution. Generally, the ratio of sugar to water can range anywhere from 1:1 to 2:1.

Once you have a syrup, you can add flavorings, add about a tablespoon of any liquid extract. Some extracts out there are quite exotic, but if one adds 1 cup of fresh squeezed juice to 1 cup of heavy or thick syrup, one would have a fairly nice flavored syrup. Some ideas for this are:

• Strawberry
• Blueberry
• Cherry
• Mango
• Passion Fruit
• Melons (covered earlier)
• Citrus (covered earlier)
• Peach
• Nectarines
• Plums