Cherry Pomegranate Molasses

If you’ve never used Pomegranate Molasses, you’re missing out. It’s a lovely mix of sweet and sour and great on lamb and other meats and mixed into marinades and dressings. I didn’t have enough pomegranate juice, but I DID have cherry juice. So we did a blend of the two. It turned out great.

Pomegranate Molasses
Adapted from Lisa Lin at healthynibblesandbits.com

4 cups pomegranate juice (I used a blend of cherry and pomegranate)
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice, about one large lemon

Cook the juice down until its reduced by about half. Then add in the sugar and lemon juice and continue reducing until the mixture becomes a sticky syrup. Note that it will be more liquid when hot, so remove a bit and let it cool to check consistency.

Pour into a mason jar and store in your fridge.

Link to my carrot salad with pomegranate recipe: https://youtu.be/65WW4pSMhmo?si=Kp7EVMEAX10hsuWN

Link to my shaved Brussels Sprout recipe with pomegranate: https://youtu.be/EMKz8lxGFqQ?si=JJLhGoZPLCWtip4E

[Music] [Music] hey homesteaders gardeners and Cooks my name is Jennifer welcome to Miles Away Farm or welcome back today in the kitchen this is just kind of a fun experiment have you guys ever used pomegranate molasses or even heard of pomegranate molasses it was one of those things that was just way off my radar for a long time and then probably because of odeling who has become very very popular he writes a food column for the New York Times he writes food columns for the UK I think he’s based out of the UK but his Heritage is from the Middle East and so he’s written four or five different cookbooks that are all kind of Middle Eastern based recipes he tends to be pretty heavy vegetable not vegetarian necessarily but a lot of vegetable heavy dishes and and pomegranate molasses is a very common ingredient in that part of the world and as he gained popularity it became a lot more popular as an ingredient for years I couldn’t find it in my local grocery store I’m not sure I could even still find it in my local grocery store this is a bottle that I bought up in Spokane Washington which is about 4 hours away from us at the Cost Plus World Market which is one of my favorite places to just go poke around for fun ingredients because I kept seeing it in recipes and wasn’t able to find it locally and it is simp simply pomegranate juice with some citric acid added and some sugar added and it’s cooked down until it’s a syrupy form and so no actual molasses molasses is actually part of sugar that’s left over when the white sugar has been extracted but it has a similar kind of sweet and tart and maybe just a hair of a bitter note in there it’s sticky it’s really just lovely and delicious oeni recommends it in particular for lamb dishes but it’s really just a nice drizzle on anything that you want a little bit of that kind of sweet and sour and in the middle of probably October I was going to my local grocery store and there was a guy in the parking lot of the grocery store who was selling bags of polyg granates and I’m sure he had come up from California or Arizona or someplace where they are able to grow easily and he was selling them for $20 for a pretty big bag of pomegranates there were probably seven or eight in there and I love pomegranates I tried to grow them here were Zone 7A and theoretically we should be able to grow them here but I’ve never been able to pull it off I think I’ve planted them twice and we get a cold snap and it dies completely back to the ground and then for whatever reason the Gophers seem to really really enjoy the pomegranate tree as well and so the roots were getting eaten and so I’ve kind of given up on trying to grow pomegranate but I love pomegranates it’s one of my favorite seasonal fruits in September October and so I bought this big bag and I was playing around with chopped carrot salad that I’ll put a link to that video below it’s really really good it’s one of my favorite fall treats and that has pomegranate seeds in it then I think I did the shaved Russel sprout salad that also had pomegranate in it link to that below as well and so I was playing with all things pomegranate but I had two or three left over that were starting to get quite dry on the outside and I needed to do something with them and I thought I probably should try making some pomegranate syrup that would be fun to play with you know if you’ve ever had grite de in a Shirley Temple I used to drink Shirley temples when I was a kid and a Shirley Temple is just coke with some PM granate syrup in it and so I thought I should make some pommegranate syrup and then it dawned to me what I should make is polyrate molasses and so I just Googled a recipe for this and it was just pomegranate juice sugar and some lemon juice the ingredient on this bottle is pomegranate juice sugar and citric acid and lemon juice is basically citric acid so that’s where that’s coming from and then I saw a really cool thing on how to get juice out of pomegranates quickly which is you put them in a heavy duty Ziploc bag and just crush them with a rolling pin and so that was a brilliant tip and then it turned out I only had two or three PM granates left and that isn’t a ton of juice I also in my freezer because I made Jam commercially to sell at farmers markets for many years I’ve still got some frozen fruit left over I’ve stopped making Jam but I had a two gallon bag of pitted sweet cherries and I thought I’m just going to dry those my husband loves them in oatmeal and so I’m just going to thaw this out throw them in the dehydrator dry them for use in oatmeal and get them out of my freezer and it turned out because they’ been frozen for at that point a couple of years there was a ton of juice in there because basically when you freeze fruit imagine water balloons with sugar in them those ice crystals poke holes in all those water balloons and so Once you thaw out something that’s been frozen a whole lot of moisture comes out of it and so I had probably at least a couple of cups of cherry juice just from thawing those cherries before I put them in the dehydrator and so and since I didn’t have a lot of pomegranate juice I thought I’m just going to make a cherry pomegranate syrup instead and so this is mostly Cherry but with some pomegranate juice I will put the recipe for actual pomegranate syrup or pomegranate molasses in the description below which is what I was Loosely following but I was using a mix of cherry and pomegranate what I came up with is quite delicious and it’s very syrupy you can see that in the video and what I did is I poured the hot syrup into this jar so it was still boiling and got poured into this jar put the lid on and then immediately turned it upside down this is called a hot fill and hold method so I did not water bath can this the Cherry syrup is quite acidic and when you do a hot fill and hold if your contents are over 180° and you pour it in here and put the lid on and turn it upside down for 3 minutes that 180° temperature will essentially kill any mold spores that might be on the lid and you don’t actually have to water bath can this I could have water bath canned it it wouldn’t have been a big deal it was just a single jar and I was like I just don’t feel like doing it that’s called hot fill and hold the national Center for home food preservation and extension offices really frown on that they freak out and they tell you that absolutely that is not safe for a home caner to do however it is used commercially in all kinds of products including jams and so I think the reason that they don’t encourage it with home canners is because we home canners don’t use usually have things like thermometers and they don’t take into consideration their elevation and so they just assume that home canners are not capable of making sure that things are hot enough when they do it I was willing to take the chance on this it’s very acidic so I’m not going to get botulism spores or things like that reproducing in here because it’s quite acidic and I just didn’t want to take the time to actually can it the one thing about hot fill and hold that you need to be aware of and I have run into this is if you’re doing multiple jars one your jar should be warm when you start as soon as you put something hot in a cold jar that cold jar is going to bring that temperature down pretty quickly and so you’re going to drop below 180 pretty fast and then the other thing is as you get to the bottom if you’re doing multiple jars as you get to the bottom of your pot the contents have cooled off considerably in that two or 3 minutes that it takes you to fill up those jars and so you want to be aware of that and keep your heat on or just don’t take the chance and just water bath can stuff if you’re doing multiple jars I’ve had product mold where it was the last jar that I put in the jar that I did hot fill and hold on because the contents in the pan because a lot of surface area not a lot of mass anymore just cooled off too fast and so it was not hot enough by the time I got to the last jar so not suggesting you do hot Fel and hold but there is a safe way to do it and it is very common in commercial canning in certain applications not all applications and so usually things that are very sweet and very naturally acidic so I just wanted to talk about that a little bit it’s kind of fun but sorry long rambling introduction to this video but some interesting food science there pomegranate molasses or in my case Cherry pomegranate molasses let’s get started so as I mentioned I started out with about four cups give or take of cherry juice this is the commercial pomegranate molasses just to show you what the ingredients typically are very simple I’m sure you could make this recipe just out of bottled pomegranate juice that you can get at the store here’s my pomegranate seeds and I’m just using a heavy duty freezer bag here and smooshing all of these little aals to pop them open so that I don’t have to do it in a different way this is a very effective technique air in the bag makes it hard and so you’ll see me release the air out of this bag a couple of different times in an effort to try to not have that air bubble acting as a pillow and not being being able to squish what I needed to squish but other than that this worked brilliantly and they say that you can get anywhere from a half a cup to a cup of juice out of a palm granate depending on the size and these didn’t seem to be super crazy juicy but they had been sitting for a couple of months and then in an effort to get the very last of any flavor out of these pomegranate seeds I went ahead and put a strainer over my pot and I just kind of cooked them down in the cherry juice and now the pomegranate juice for a few minutes just to get the very last of whatever was in there out and I think I’ve been cooking this cherry juice down for a little while before I even started to add the pomegranate juice to [Music] this at this point I’m going to filter everything into a smaller sauser pan because I’ve cook this down probably by about half at this point and a little fine mesh strainer is always nice for getting out any little bits of things that might be in there that you don’t want and so now we’re down to I don’t know this is probably a couple of cups at this point I’m adding a half a cup of sugar and then basically the juice from a lemon so around 1/4 cup um I didn’t measure this but I was fine if it was a little bit more than that and then here we’ve cooked it down almost to finished stage and I’ve done enough different syrups and candies over the years that when you start to see these really fine bubbles that’s an indication that you’re pretty much there when there’s a lot of water still boiling off the bubbles are quite big and when the bubbles start to get small it’s an indication that your temperature is actually going above 212 because you’ve cooked off all the water and you’re now basically making candy so there’s an example of what it looked like I decided it was done and then this is just getting poured into a pint jar and just in case the heat shock makes that pint jar break I do have this sitting in another container it’s rare but it does happen and so I’m just making sure that if that breaks I don’t have pomegranate juice all over my kitchen here that pot has cooled off and you can see how thick our syrup is and I did taste this and it doesn’t taste exactly like the commercial product of course because it’s more cherry than it is Palm granate but really delicious I think it’s going to definitely be a great product to drizzle onto various meats and probably also over pancakes so if you like food recipe adventures and you happen to have a big bottle of pomegranate juice in your fridge or access to Fresh pomegranates give this recipe a try tribe thanks for watching tribe if you like this kind of content give me a thumbs up subscribe leave me a comment and share I have 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