Home › Frozen Desserts › Sugar Syrup
Sugar Syrup
Put two cups of sugar and a half cup of water over the fire in a saucepan. Stir until the sugar is dissolved, then let it cook slowly without touching it for about ten minutes, or till it is a clear syrup. Be careful not to use too much before sampling, for it is a great sweetener.-Anne Warner.
A rich stock syrup for sweetening ices, sherbets and fruit punches, kept ready in a jar. The proportion here is unusually heavy on sugar, so the ten-minute boil matters more than it looks.
- The hinge: do not stir once it boilsStirring a boiling sugar solution drags crystals down from the sides and the whole pan can seize into a grainy mass. Stir only until the sugar has dissolved, then leave it alone; brush the sides down with a wet pastry brush if crystals cling.
- What ten minutes actually gives youTwo cups sugar to half a cup water is roughly a 4:1 syrup by volume. A slow ten-minute boil will carry it somewhere into the thread-to-soft-ball range, but the recipe specifies neither a temperature nor a stage, and where it lands depends on your heat and pan; the "clear syrup" asked for is a look. If you work with a thermometer, stopping around the thread stage gives a pourable syrup that keeps; carried much further it will thicken or crystallise on standing.
- "Over the fire" and "slowly"A moderate flame, uncovered, with the syrup at a steady low boil rather than a rolling one. On a modern hob this is medium to medium-low in a heavy pan.
- Yield and keepingAbout one and a quarter to one and a half cups. Cool, then refrigerate in a sealed jar; at this concentration it holds for a month or more, and any crystals that form can be re-dissolved with gentle heat and a spoonful of water.
- Why frozen desserts want syrupDissolved sugar lowers the freezing point, which is what keeps a sorbet or water ice scoopable instead of solid. Add it to the cold fruit base rather than dumping dry sugar in, which may not fully dissolve in the churn.
- "A great sweetener"Warner's caution is practical, not decorative. Sweeten the base to taste while it is cold, because freezing mutes perceived sweetness by a noticeable margin "" a mixture that tastes correct at room temperature will read flat once frozen.
- Pan choiceUse a heavy saucepan with a thick base and more headroom than seems necessary; thin pans scorch the syrup at the edges and a small pan boils over the instant the water content drops.
Boiled stock syrups of this kind come straight out of the confectioner's trade, where sugar solutions were graded by stage - thread, pearl, ball - long before thermometers were common in home kitchens, which is why an instruction like this one gives a time and a look rather than a temperature. A jar of syrup kept on the shelf let a cook build a water ice or sherbet from whatever fruit came in that morning, since a hand-cranked freezer wanted the mixture already balanced before it went into the can. The recipe is credited to Anne Warner, one of the named contributors whose recipes such collections printed under their own names.