This time I had close to a kilo (2lbs) of strawberries about to turn and I have plenty of jam so I turned my hand to making strawberry cordial/syrup for friendlier strawberry milkshakes or maybe put some aside with gelatine to make a strawberry jelly (jello).
Ingredients
- 1kg of Strawberries (about 2lb)
- 1 litre of water (about a quart)
- 1/8 tsp of pure Sucralose (equivalent to 1-2 cups of sugar)
Instructions
- Rinse the strawberries
- Hull them (cut out the tops and stems with a paring knife)
- Halve them
- Place the halved strawberries into a medium saucepan
- Cover them with the water and bring the water to a boil. As soon as it reaches a boil, reduce to a simmer for 20 minutes
- Skim off the foam. The strawberries’ colour will have transferred to the water
- Remove the pot from the heat and strain through a fine mesh strainer. Do not press the solids or the liquid will become cloudy
- Discard the solids, add the sweetener to the liquid and bring it back to a boil. Then reduce the heat to a simmer for 5 minutes
- Skim any more foam to leave a clear deep red liquid.
- Remove from the heat, allow to cool and pour into a container
- Refrigerated, the syrup should last several weeks
I have thought about adding some lemon juice as a preservative so the syrup can be held, unfrigerated, in a dispenser bottle but I will try that next time.
Before taking this photo, I played with ratios and found an authentic strawberry flavoured milkshake needed a 1 (cordial) :2 (milk) ratio or thereabouts. In total it made around 600-700mL (a bit over a pint) which surprised me given the recipe called for 1 litre of water but maybe some evaporated and got strained out.
How Many Carbs?
If we calculate, based on the sugar content of the strawberries, we get an estimate of around 60g of sugars in 600mL of cordial. However, this assumes all the sugars from the strawberries was transferred to the cordial and did not get thrown away with the solids.
To get around this I thought I would see what my glucometer said and it came back with a sugar concentration of 32 mmol/L. Using the usual conversion tables this gives us around 575 mg/dL or 6g/L, much less that the upper limit. However, a glucometer only reacts with glucose, not fructose, or sucrose which strawberries also contain in roughly the same levels. So, to be on the safe side, I would probably triple this figure to give us 18g/L.
The Practical Diabetic 