— Marion Mason

Before I answer your question, we have a wonderful 44 second video from one of my culinary Idols Lydia Bastianich, and she is going to talk ever so briefly about shrub. So today all the rage is about shrubs. This drink that you mixed. Something fermented with something sweet. I used to drink this as a little kid Grandma used to make it for us all the time to quite chapters. water absolutely vinegar wine vinegar that she had she would put sugar but I make some simple sugar syrup and mix mix and you got yourself. But Lydia drank it when she was two and three and four and so on up the ladder. There we go. So Lydia gave you a beautiful beautiful video and presentation about making a shrub and if you noticed she had it in a big gigantic picture with ice already in it. So I'm going to show you a couple of good ways Marion to really make a delicious shrub. She was using red wine vinegar, I believe so a little vinegar 101 you can use something like an organic white wine vinegar. If you want to have a clearer beverage and this is a delicious vinegar that doesn't have a stinging after taste and what I'm quite fond of and then we have from a local vinegar store here in Philadelphia. This is a true balsamic vinegar from Modena made from the tribbiana grape and it's quite delicious and it has a nice viscosity to it. Um this I call over the counter. I'm not sure how delicious it would really be in a shrub and two more we have here in Philadelphia a local kombucha maker who is now making a delicious array of vinegar. So this is pear ginger, and I thought that I would use the pair Ginger. However if you do not happen to have any vinegar and you just happen to have a bottle of red raspberry shrub. This is made by a local foodie here in Philadelphia actually Lancaster and the Amish Amish Country. It's award-winning and you just take a tablespoon out and mix it with club soda or whatever and you have a delicious drink so you can use two things. We're going to use a good vinegar today and we're going to use I'm not going to use the delicious sand Pellegrino, but this is a dandelion Ginger effervescent Botanical what it essentially is is just a tea. So if you remember from science lab do as you wanna and acid to water, so what I'm going to do first is pour a little pour about Doesn't that have a beautiful appearance to it a lovely lovely head? Now if you wanted to you could take a reamer and you could muddle some blueberries or some fresh fruit or whatever to add a little color and maybe a little bit more sweetness. And then what I'm going to do next is open up my beautiful bottle of Baba's. Acid trip, that sounds good to me and I'm going to stir it a little bit. And then I'm going to add a little bit of ice. I have like a little bar here. Kidding and I might want to add some fresh spearmint to it to make it look lovely and beautiful. And I also have if I wanted to get you know extra fancy, I could stick on a piece of orange or whatever. I don't know if it looks too much like a Hawaiian cocktail or not when you do that, but it has a delicious flavor. So what you need is a good vinegar and your favorite kind of effervescent. I do like San Pellegrino. It just has such a beautiful and lovely flavor to it. And if you're setting up a bar and non-alcoholic bar, it looks very nice and let me take a sip for you. Oh, it's so good. So delicious now I oh it has a little kick to it from the ginger. So it's very very good. So they're good for digestion. I would use a good vinegar because as I said before drinking them for the first time does make one thing that you're actually drinking a salad dressing. And I don't think anybody wants to to do that at all. The other thing another beverage aside from shrub is something called a switchel. And a switchel has Jamaican and English American Roots. It's been around since about the 1700s and it was served. In fact at the Continental Congress and what it essentially is. Um a portion of apple cider vinegar with a sweetener usually molasses, sometimes there's muddled fruit involved and again a club soda or water as they used in those days. It's called switchel because they would take a switch off of the tree a swizzle and then it became switchel both very delicious both very good and I have seen one or two students during my tenure here at Rouxbe include a shrub in their shindig and you know, you have to get that beverage just right. So it's not as though you were just adding, you know a bunch of liquids together, but I love them and they're delicious and Let's give it a try.

Switchel