Post #729447 by mikehooker on Sat, Oct 11, 2014 2:14 PM

Alright, last night I made my first batch of homemade grenadine (left) and raspberry syrup (right), then I combined equal parts to make fassionola.

The process took maybe an hour including cool down time and it was streamlined with assistance from my better half (OK, she pretty much took control of this operation). We followed the raspberry syrup recipe below:

http://toriavey.com/toris-kitchen/2013/08/homemade-raspberry-syrup/

It came out real thin (better for cocktails than pancakes) and full of flavor. Since I've never tried fassionola before I can't say whether this blend is as good, better or worse than the bottled kind but it made a for a very interesting ingredient that I look forward to experimenting with in cocktails.

Since I had some leftover grenadine I went ahead and compared my pomegranate, sugar and orange flower water concoction to the Rose's I had on hand. Since I don't know how to properly dissect the intricacies of these flavors, I'll just say that the homemade version seemed to have more "bite" to it and none of the cough medicine flavor that the HFCS laced variety possesses. I also did a side by side blind taste test comparison of the two in identically mixed cocktails. The difference wasn't overwhelmingly apparent although I did choose the one with homemade grenadine as the better drink as I felt it was a bit smoother and didn't have a bitter aftertaste.

So that's my two cents for what it's worth. I'll continue to play around with this stuff for the next couple weeks (assuming that's roughly my shelf life), but I'll probably still buy the English stuff to compare it and see if homemade is worth the effort.