Coffee syrup is a short phrase, but it’s one that would sound more than a little odd to anyone that hasn’t been to a coffee shop in recent years. Starbucks was the first on the scene, creating flavored lattes and other coffee drinks sure to delight. These drinks contained several pumps of syrup, and soon, other coffee shops started making syrups of their own.
In this article, we’re going to talk a little about everything involved in making your own coffee syrup, from the fine details to the big picture.
Why use coffee syrup?
There’s a simple reason that you might use coffee syrup: flavor! The flavors that you can generate, extract, and enable within coffee are utterly fantastic, but being able to supplement them with some wonderful flavors in a well-made syrup is something truly lovely indeed.
There are some complex and elegant syrups out there, and they all have something in common: they tend to work to boost the inherent flavors within a cup of coffee. For example, one of Starbucks’ most famous and popular syrups is caramel syrup. It simply adds a caramel flavor to a drink, leading to the drink overall being a sweeter, more luxurious event.
These syrups have become utterly widespread because of the flavors they can bring to a cup of coffee, and today we’re going to talk about creating some syrups of your own.
What ingredients do you need?
There is a wide range of different ingredients that you might need, depending upon which flavors and combinations you might choose to go for. However, there are only very few ingredients that you truly need.
The first is sugar. We would recommend white sugar, since it tends to dissolve very easily, and it brings a very simple sweetness to syrup. It doesn’t complicate things with the addition of molasses, as brown sugar does, instead keeping things straightforward to taste and understand.
Aside from white sugar, the only other main ingredient that you really need is water. Water is used to dissolve the white sugar into, and is a simple, accessible ingredient that everyone has.
Sometimes, people can get a little intense about their water needs at home. The truth is that it isn’t that big a deal in this case: you’re adding so much sugar to the water that you certainly won’t be able to taste any of the minerals from a hard water area.
The final category of ingredients that you need is flavorings. This is a broad category, and is very hard to really consider with any degree of accuracy.
These flavorings could include spices and herbs, or even flowers or melted confectionery. Really, there are a lot of potential options for different kinds of additions to syrups.
What equipment do you need?
The only equipment you need is a small saucepan, a heat source, and a whisk. These are things that most people have in their kitchen, making the generating of syrup wonderfully accessible.
The only other thing that you might consider tracking down is some form of storage bottle or jar for the finished syrup. This is by no means necessary, but it can be a very nice thing to use in your home when you might have need of it.
For example, you can get syrup bottles on Amazon with ease. A bottle like that one might be ideal as it has a dasher top. That means that you can easily upend the bottle and pour in a controlled manner, without having a hard time spilling syrup everywhere, or preventing air from getting into the bottle, thus making pouring quite tricky.
You could also go for a squeezable bottle like these ones. This might make it easier to actively direct the syrup as you’re working with it, leading to you creating pretty matters on the inside of a latte glass, for example. This isn’t totally necessary, of course, but it could be both convenient and pretty.
A brief recipe
A recipe for a simple sugar syrup isn’t a complex thing, since it doesn’t have to be. In this recipe, we’re going to direct you to use twice as much sugar as water, by weight. This will make the syrup shelf stable, allowing you to store it more easily.
- Get started by adding 100ml of water, and 200g sugar to a small pan.
- Put the small pan over medium-low heat, and whisk as you heat. The sugar will dissolve rapidly.
- Once the sugar is dissolved and the syrup is hot, it’s made! If you’d like to add any spices, add them now, and then strain them out after thirty minutes.
- To make pumpkin spice syrup, for instance, add a clove, and half a teaspoon each of ground ginger, ground nutmeg, and ground cinnamon.
- Once you’ve strained the syrup, decant it into an airtight container, allow it to cool to room temperature, and seal the container.
Infusing additional flavors
This is something that we’ve mentioned briefly throughout this article – the idea of infusing flavors into your syrups depending on what you might like to bring to the syrup you’re making. This could be something fairly simple, such as cinnamon, or something a little more complex, such as kiwi and mint.
The core tenet to bear in mind is that when adding flavors, you’re essentially brewing a cup of very sweet tea. The flavors you want to add should be added to the hot syrup in the pan, after being crushed, ground, or squashed to increase their surface area.
Mix the hot syrup and the flavorings together well, and allow a brief infusion for around thirty minutes – as you would with a cup of tea, though you’d typically only do that for three minutes.
After that time has elapsed, strain the syrup through a coffee filter or cheesecloth, and you should be good to go! The syrup will be ready for adding to your drinks.
Conclusion
We hope that this article has imparted a small piece of wisdom about coffee syrups into your mind. It can be a fascinating new world, but it doesn’t have to be an insurmountable one!