I made some cordials yesterday and decided to play with the recipes a little adding some low glycemic level agave nectar to the Lemon and Raw Cane sugar to the Lime. Since the Simple syrup makes up about half of the liquid for the cordials, making them differently like this could have a major affect on the over all product.
I went with the agave nectar in the Lemon cordial and the turbinado sugar in the lime mainly because the agave wasn’t going to compete too much with the lemon, the lime I’m nervous about, I don’t know how the molasses characteristics are going to affect the over all cordial.
The agave made the simple sugar a little less dense and seems to have incorporated well. The lemon cordial is clear and inviting. It’s been put up, so we’ll just have to wait about a month now to see how it turns out.
The turbinado sugar is a raw cane sugar, which still has some of the molasses surrounding the crystals. Unlike the substitution amount for the agave (.5 ~.66 : 1), the turbinado is a one for one substitution with refined sugar. It made the simple syrup for the cordial quite dark, which was interesting and will make the cordial a lot darker than the last of them I’ve made. The molasses in the mix should make for an interesting complexity in the cordial. Again though, we don’t get to find out how it tastes for a month.
The liquor store also didn’t have the Mohawk Vodka that I usually use, but hey did have some Popov, which since it is distilled in Connecticut, should have the same non-flavor & non-smell characteristics as the rest of the American vodkas. This is really important for cordial making. You don’t want to have the flavors and smells of the vodka competing with the rest of the cordial. Makes it a mucky mess.