Grenadine

An interesting thing happens when you start hosting events. The amounts of ingredients suddenly goes up. When we at Pittsburgh Cocktail Week planned and hosted the grand opening event at Maggie's Farm Rum I found myself making enough simple syrup and grenadine to outfit a brand new bar to make drinks for 4 hours for 30 people. (Note, this is much more of either than I make for home use.) The downside afterwards was having about 20 oz of fresh grenadine to hopefully use before it goes bad. Thus began my quest for grenadine heavy drinks, and there aren't a ton of them out there. 

Before we get to the drinks though, let's talk about the grenadine itself. Like many other boozenerds it started out with Pom Wonderful. In this case, 32oz to be exact. I decided to try and use Morgenthaler's recipe over here. I measured out an equal amount of sugar, (by weight not volume,) stirred that in to the pomegranate and then heated it in the microwave to speed things up. I didn't boil the syrup just heated it, this is important as Morgenthaler points out, boiling the syrup gives you brown grenadine. Now here is where i differ slightly from the illustrious Mr. Morgenthaler. He calls for pomegranate molasses and orange flower water. I didn't have any pomegranate molasses and lacked time to track any down. I did add orange flower water but also rose flower water. 1/4 teaspoon of each to entire batch. The flower waters really added a noticeable floral quality to the finished product, without either being overwhelming. Since then I've been trying to use grenadine in bulk with things like Cesar's Rum Punch (pg 120 Beachbum Berry Remixed) which uses a full ounce to offset the lime juice and Rhum Barbancourt. My wife has been particularly enjoying it as I end up with a lot of pink drinks which she finds "pretty". I'm still working on other recipes that call for grenadine, and I'm striking out from just drinks. You wouldn't think that grenadine goes with Kung Pao chicken, but you would be wrong. (I take no responsibility should you actually add grenadine to Kung Pao chicken)