Sweet & Sour Substitute

There are many recipes in the Grog Log, Intoxica & vintage recipes elsewhere that call for 'sweet & sour' mix. Personally, I won't use bottled S&S mix, which is loaded with high fructose corn syrup & artificial flavourings. When you take the time & expense to fresh squeeze juices & use top shelf spirits the old S&S will really muck up an otherwise fine drink.

Does anyone have a suggestion about what to use when an otherwise fine recipe calls for S&S mix? I really appreciate any suggestions that you might have!

Cheers & Mahalo,

Craig in Cincinnati

BB in "Sippin' Safari" recommends:

One part simple syrup to two parts fresh lemon juice.

I think the fresh lemon juice and sugar is the way to go. Having said that, Sunkist makes a decent sweet & sour if you're willing to give a premade product one more shot (not sure which products you've used so far). It's something like 43% juice and doesn't have that preservative/chemical aftertaste or smell imho. It actually smells like lemon. I use it to make pirate grogs (Blackbeard's Ghosts) and it works fairly well.

We ('we' as in, TofuJoe and I) use 1 part fresh lemon, 1 part fresh lime, and 1 part simple. Totally easy.

I use 1/2 part lime, 1/2 part lemon, 1 part simple as suggested to me in 2002 by Martin Cate. Works like a charm.

-=C

For great margarita's, I use 1 pt key lime juice to 1/4 pt. simple syrup. I am not sure how it would work in an exotic, but it really tricks up the margarita. Since you can use less of the "mix" in your drink, i.e. instead of 3 oz of margarita mix, I use 1 ounce lime juice with 1/4 oz simple syrup, it's important to shake like hell in order to melt the ice and achieve enough liquid volume for your drink. I wouldn't suggest a 1:1 ratio when substituting fresh sweet and sour with store bought.

While we're on the topic of substituting ingredients,does anyone have any recommendations for a honey/honey water substitute.I don't mind it as a food ingredient,but find it too overpowering in a drink.
I have been told to try agave syrup,but haven't got around to buying some yet.Any other ideas out there.

Which is it supposed to be? Lemon + simple Syrup . . . . lime + simple syrup . . . . . lemon+lime+simple syrup? What are the "Correct""Sweet & Sour Mix" components?
I know, I know . . . I'm old so I confuse easily . . .

I'm inclined to use Melintur's formula. I like the variety of using both lemon and lime, and tend to like things sweeter rather than tart.

No matter which you use, it has to be better than the store-brought crap with high fructose corn syrup and preservatives!!

HFCS!!! Slowly I turned...inch by in...step by step...

If I was using simple syrup I would go the martikian route with Melintur's proportions. But since I use pretty dense Rock Candy Syrup that has three or more times the sugar per volume as simple syrup, I use essentially* equal volumes of lime, lemon, and RCS.

*If I use a particularly unstable batch of RCS, I lighten up on that part.

I should have disclosed that my simple syrup is 2:1 sugar:water, and I bring softly to boil just long enough to break the disachharide bonds.

The sour mix is a great balance of sweet:sour - sweet at the front of the flavour, sour note at the end withought being cloying.

On 2007-11-16 09:43, Melintur wrote:
I bring softly to boil just long enough to break the disachharide bonds.

Could you go into more details here? I'm still trying to understand the science of sugar, and every time I've boiled a syrup I've burned the sugar...

I have been told to try agave syrup,but haven't got around to buying some yet.

A "thumbs up" on agave syrup from me. It's not as sweet as honey, doesn't crystallize, and seems to dissolve better when mixing drinks.

On 2007-11-16 10:54, Scottes wrote:

On 2007-11-16 09:43, Melintur wrote:
I bring softly to boil just long enough to break the disachharide bonds.

Could you go into more details here? I'm still trying to understand the science of sugar, and every time I've boiled a syrup I've burned the sugar...

2:1 sugar to water.
Heat on medium. Stir casually and constantly, looking at the solution. It will be cloudy. I use a silicon spatula and wipe the sides consistently to keep crystals from forming. The mixture will approach boiling and then have a nice boil at which point you will notice that the sugar changes from cloudy to clear (this will happen very soon after the boil). At that point IMMEDIATELY remove the saucepan from the heat - move it to a trivet, another burner that is off, etc.

Now when you say burned the sugar, do you notice it in the flavor, color? The flavor does change a bit as the some of sucrose changes into glucose + Fructose solution. Not as much as if you added an acid to get invert sugar mind you!

The most important thing is a soft ramp up to heat, then as soon as you see it clear (or for starters as soon as it hits a boil) get it away from the heat!

If you are concerned about burning why heat it at all? You can make a 2:1 sugar syrup in a bottle without heating it (at least with superfine sugar). It just needs a lot of shaking and it will take a while to clear up. Am I missing something here?

On 2007-11-16 15:43, LeChuck wrote:
If you are concerned about burning why heat it at all? You can make a 2:1 sugar syrup in a bottle without heating it (at least with superfine sugar). It just needs a lot of shaking and it will take a while to clear up. Am I missing something here?

Nope, just personal preference. I find using heat less effort for me than the shaking method, but I have it down to a science. Your milage may vary.

Also the heat breaks some of the saccharide bonds and makes the simple sweeter than table sugar alone ( 1 C12H22O11 + 1 H20 + heat -> 2 C6H1206 ) i. e. 2 sugar molecules out of one double.

though I suppose you could shake with cream of tartar to give Extra H+ molecules and force the inversion that way too.

sorry, my science geek is showing.

-=C

When I burned the sugar I certainly noticed the change in color, and taste. But I went way overboard, since I had been trying to reduce a syrup after adding sugar. I know better now. Thanks for the info!

As for caramelization, considerable heat is required. Sugar molecules are made up of various combinations of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). As you raise the heat applied to a mass of sugar, you're going send H and O atoms flying off, reattaching whenever possible. When you raise the temperature to a certain point, the H and O atoms are unable to reattach and the C atoms begin to accumulate in large quantities, resulting in the caramelization effect. Taken to the extreme, you could chase off all of the H and O atoms and be left with pure carbon residue suitable for your barbecue grill.

Cane sugar is the disaccharide (double sugar), sucrose, which is made up of two monosaccharides (single sugars), glucose and fructose. Fructose caramelizes at 110º C (230º F) and glucose caramelizes at 160º C (320º F). Fructose is responsible for most of the dark color and flavor changes because because it caramelizes at by far the lowest temperature among the monosaccharides. If you want really dark caramel, use pure honey, which is all fructose.

If you boil sugar water on the stove without a buffer, you can easily get up to the temperature necessary to caramelize fructose; and depending on your particular stove, maybe glucose as well. If you heat your sugar water in a canning jar sitting inside a large pot of boiling water, it is pretty easy to prevent it from reaching 110C/230F. That's because the water inside the jar is being heated mainly by the boiling water outside the jar, which has a temperature limit of 100C/212F. The only additional heat is coming from directly underneath the jar, which bounces around a little in the boiling water (continually cooling that spot toward 100C/212F). So as long as you keep stirring, it would be difficult to caramelize the sugar. If you stop stirring for long enough, the temperature of the sugar at the bottom of the jar could hit 110C/230C.

The Half Boiling Rule of Thumb

In making various kinds of syrups, other than pure sugar, the ingredients other than sugar can undergo transformations to their integrity by overheating. The temperature to overheat many things can be somewhere less than boiling.

I'm not sure who came up with this rule of thumb, but it is older than the hills. Of course, finding the exact temperature that is halfway to boiling is a more modern twist that came about after we could measure temperature.

I use a candy thermometer, which is about a half inch in diameter, about a foot long, and has a clip to fasten to the side of a pot. Using that thermometer, you can fairly easily control the temperature (knowing when to give more heat or less). Just keep the temperature at 50º C or 122º F. It takes more time to make the syrup because the water evaporates a lot slower at the lower temperature.

Anyway, that's what I do when I make my real orgeat, or my passion fruit syrup, pomegranate liqueur, etc. Just as brocolli, cauliflower, cabbage, and other things smell and taste quite different when they are scalded, so do a lot of the things that go into syrups. I try to avoid changing their flavor too much by using the half boiling method.

Resurrecting this discussion.

As a side note, I add a few drops of lime or other citrus juice when heating to make simple syrup as it is a catalyst.
I have found the shake the crap out of it method does not fully dissolve the sugar and the higher the proportion, the worse it works.

I am seeing basically 3 versions of Sweet and Sour Mix around the web:

1:1 Lemon Juice and Simple Syrup

1:1 Lemon and Lime Juice to Simple Syrup

1 part Lemon, .5 Lime juice and 1.5 parts simple

I had always assumed by way of Tiki+ that the first was the version. The wife is emphatic that the Cadillac Margaritas at Taco Boy on Folly Beach, which include "house made sweet & sour" have lime juice. So I'll be trying all three methods to see which works best in that recipe.

Swanky, I'm looking forward to seeing your results.

I have also found that the "shake the hell out of it" method does not fully dissolve the sugar in cold-process simpile syrup. For this reason I have been using my blender for a number of years now with great success. Blend the hell out of it, then bottle it and wait for the air bubbles to float out of it.

If I were making fresh sour, I'd use a 1:1 mixture of Lemon/Lime and Sugar.

I suppose you might want to change that, though, depending on the intended use.

I use a 1:1 ratio of lemon juice and simple syrup (1:1 ratio sugar/water).

However, I never made sour mix.... whenever a recipe called for sour mix, I always just subbed half lemon juice/half simple syrup.

for example:

Recipe calls for 1 oz of sour mix. I sub .5 oz lemon and .5 symple syrup.

of course, this is at home. If I were a bartender in a busy commercial bar, I'd definitely have some mixed up to make life easier.

howlinowl