Rootbeer-ish Herbal Tea
Concentrate
When I was little, family birthdays meant root beer
floats. I love rootbeer, and never developed a taste for
other sodas. But now it’s too sweet for my taste and my
health—with diabetes in the family I’ve got to be careful, but
even sugar-free versions are sweeter than I like.
Experiments with making herbal tea blends filled the cupboard
with herbs and spices for infusions, and a carbonation kit led
to chilled sparkling teas for hot summer days. After a lot
of study of recipes available online, and several failed
attempts, I came up with this sugar-free, nonalcoholic
rootbeer-ish concentrate.
I keep it in the refrigerator and scoop out a bit now and
then to add to a cold bottle of sparkling water, and enjoy.
It took a few tries to get something I liked. After picking
out what I wanted pretty much by eye, I weighed what I added:
Ingredients by grams
Sarsaparilla root 10.9 grams
Licorice root 2.4
grams
Birch
Bark
3.4 grams
Ginger (fresh). 10.2 grams
Vanilla bean 1.4
grams
Cloves
0.7 grams
Star
anise
3.7 grams
Chicory root 3.3
grams
Allspice
1.7 grams
Peppermint leaf 0.9 grams
Gamro (Korean hydrangea) 1 dried leaf
Which looked like this, minus the gamro leaf that I forgot to add
until I'd already mixed the other spices up:
and I cut the ginger and vanilla and cracked the allspice berries
before steeping
.
Added the gamro leaf and then covered with about 0.5 L/1 pint
boiling water and let steep about 8 hours at room temp.
Then I scooped out just under 1/4 cup—maybe 50 mL of the
concentrated tea and added it to 1 pint chilled, carbonated water.
Refreshing!
It does have quite a foaming head on it--this was after a lot of
spill....
Notes on ingredients
Sarsaparilla root:
This was sourced from Frontier Co-op and is from India, Hemidesmus
indicus. I tried a version that was supposed to be from the
Mexican root, Smilax ornate, and that was very disappointing—no real
flavor at all. The Indian version is floral, sweet, and quite
lovely in other herbal mixes as well.
Licorice root sweetens, and so does Gamro (Korean hydrangea
leaf). Licorice root adds anise note as well as sweetness, and
Gamro is spicy-sweet like cinnamon-sugar—it’s sold from Korean
outlets for making a simple lovely herbal infusion by
itself. This is made from Hydrangea serrata, a species native
to Korea and Japan, not the horticultural varieties that add color
to home gardens. It’s quite expensive, but a little goes a
LONG way. I love to drop a leaf or two into any pot of herbal
tea.
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