(Blue) Rose Vodka

I grow roses, I concentrate on "blue" ones due to limited space. Queen of the violets is an old double rose with a deep perfume & a good strong purplish colour, ideal for making scented/flavoured vodka.

The Vodka quickly leaches the colour from the rose, but it ends up a light golden/yellow colour rather than a stronger pink .

I just put a bloom or 2 in vodka, with out any sugar (though 25g/500ml is reckoned to be a good amount) and let it stand for a few days to let the flavour develop properly. Once that was done I strained & bottled.

But why stop with 1 single variety of rose vodka ? Twice in a blue moon seems to be having a late summer/early autumn flush  and whilst being closer to a hybrid tea rose than the bourbon/old fashioned roses it still has a very strong perfume. So it was out with the secateurs and a few snips had a couple of those blooms in a bottle.

Tasting both is interesting, whilst they are both obviously rose flavoured they are quite different. The Queen of the violets vodka is heavy & very rosy. The Blue moon on the other hand is a bit more delicate and has definite vanilla notes. Now all I need to do is find a cocktail for it. It'll work in my Turkish delight drink, but there must be other uses though...

Turkish Delight

I've mentioned I like floral flavours a couple of time. Turkish delight usually supplies a good rose hit, hwo difficult could it be to make ?

I'm still not sure

There are two families of recipe, gelatine or non-gelatine. I went with non-gelatine. The theory is simple mix a sugar syrup with a cornflour emulsion and boil for a while, colour, flavour & allow to set. Only it didn't work like that for me. Adding the sugar to the cornflour immediately formed a thick paste, so I divided it into 2. I added about 3cl of creme de menthe to 1 batch, to give a green minty delight and a mix of rosewater & grenadine to the other to get the traditional rose. Stirring it together was fiendishly hard, but I turned it out & left it in the fridge for a couple of hours to set. The result was definitely turkish delight, but it wasn't quite right.

My mistake had been to let the cornflour emulsion cool, it needs to be  just thickening and coming to the boil when the sugar is added, at that point you should get the heavy syrup that I was looking for. I have since found a recipe that calls for the technique I inadvertently used, but I think the taste would be improved by the second boiling. I'm going to have to order up a sugar thermometer and try again.

Violets

I'm a big fan of floral flavours. I suspect that this is due to believing that Fry's chocolate & particularly their Turkish Delight were the summit of available chocolate. The turkish delight with it's rose flavour being an unbelievably exotic treat.
As time marched on  I found other turkish delights, with better rose flavours, but that small purple wrapped rectangle, still holds a place. Rose however much I love the flower & the flavour has been displaced by violet.
The ultimate being Heston Blumenthal's violet tartlets, that though is a story for a different time. As is my long list of violet creams (Charbonnel et Walker's dark enrobed are up at the top). I'm going to talk about drink (I know) as I have amongst my odd alcohols creme de violette, its a beautiful colour and a fine taste.
There are a number of cafe pousse that use it with cream, and whilst they look stunning & are quite tricky to make. It seems to play very nicely with pastis, which I usually use paraisian absinthe, only occasionally swapping out for Pernod as I prefer the formers dryness.

So when I spotted "Arsenic & Old Lace" I had to dive right in. It looks stunning too as you can see.

Here is the recipe as usual the numbers represent parts
6 Gin
2 Pastis (as I said I use la Fee parisian)
2 Creme de violette
1 vermouth
Stir with ice and serve straight up.

It's a very complex taste, with huge anise notes up front, then softening through the herbals into the florals at the end. Its not going to be a drink for everyone, but its a strong drink with complex flavours, if you can track down the violette its worth a go.