Mint, grows easily and has so much freshness to offer

The virtues of mint all gathered in refreshing sirup, bring the summer back in your glass.

Mint keeps you cool, we love it for its refreshing characteristics, especially in summer in a lovely cocktail or in homemade lemonade. Hundreds of years ago, the romans already understood the rich virtues of mint, using it in baths and perfumes, heavenly!
Today we differentiate about 25 varieties, difficult to distinguish as they pair very easily in nature…

I’d strongly recommend it to plant in the herb garden; it grows and disperses fast, a huge yield assured. As you can see in the picture, we have enough to enjoy it the whole year round! We dried them in the kitchen for several weeks hanging upside down and removed the leaves from the stems as it gives a purer flavor in our infusions, the stems are bitterer.

It would be a waste to throw the stems away though, so why not make syrup from it?

Here’s how it works:

As it depends on your yield, this recipe is a bit more intuitive.

Ingredients

  • a whole bunch of mint stems (chose an appropriate container accordingly)
  • water (as much as you need to submerge the stems)
  • 1 lemon
  • sugar (cane sugar for instance): half of your water infusion weight

Preparation

First you need to make an infusion from the stems to which you add the lemon roughly pealed and cut in pieces. Submerge it all in water and leave it to infuse overnight for at least 24 hours.
Have a taste of the water to see if the mint flavor has infused enough, leave it a bit longer if needed.
Bring it all to boil; use a little plate as shown in the picture for instance to keep the stems and lemon submerged in the infusion.

Once it has reached the boiling point, you can turn of the heat and sieve the infusion and weigh it.
Add the sugar to the water and boil it down until you obtain a syrupy consistency.
Note: keep an eye on it to prevent it from boiling down to caramel.

Sterilize your bottles by pouring boiling water over it or steam them in the steamer if you have one.

Then you're ready to fill them up, turn them around until they are cooled down. The syrup can easily be preserved for a couple of months in the fridge.
Use it in your lemonades, yoghurt, aperitif, or even as a sweetener for your homemade kefir.