Home › Syrups and Ices › Hard Black-Berry Syrup
Hard Black-Berry Syrup
(Sciroppo di amarena) Use hard but ripe black berries. They must be of the sour kind but, as said, they must not be unripe. Remove the stems and put the berries into a vase with a good piece of whole cinnamon.
The fermentation will happen after 48 hours and as soon as the berries begin to rise, stir them from time to time. Then press them to extract the juice, with a pressing machine if you have one, or with your hands, squeezing them a few at a time in cheese cloth. When the liquid has rested for a while, filter it until it becomes quite clear. When it has been depurated, put it on the fire in the following proportion and with the piece of cinnamon that was already immersed in the cherries: Twelve pounds of liquid to sixteen pounds of sugar and two ounces of citric acid, or three parts of liquid to four of sugar and the citric acid as in the above proportion.
Before putting in the sugar and the citric acid wait until the liquid is quite hot, just before boiling. Then stir continually. The boiling must be brief, four or five minutes are sufficient to incorporate the sugar in the liquid. When removing the syrup from the fire, put it in an earthen vase and bottle when quite cold.
Cork the bottles well and keep in a cool place.
The English title is a translation slip: amarena is the sour cherry, not the blackberry. Everything else in the method — the short ferment, the pressing, the very brief boil — works as written, provided you treat the finished syrup as a refrigerator product rather than a shelf-stable preserve.
- What fruit to buyUse sour cherries — morello, marasca, or any tart pie cherry — firm but fully ripe, stemmed and unpitted. Sweet cherries give a flat, cloying syrup because the whole structure of the recipe depends on the fruit's own acidity.
- The "vase"A glazed earthenware crock, glass jar or food-grade plastic bucket, loosely covered with cloth so gas escapes but flies do not. Do not seal it: this stage is an intentional 48-hour ferment and pressure will build.
- Reading the fermentA warm room — roughly 68-75F — will get it going; the recipe expects fermentation to begin at around 48 hours, when the fruit froths and lifts. Stir it down twice a day. Fuzzy mould on the surface, a nail-polish or vinegar smell, or a slimy cap means the batch has gone wrong; start again rather than pressing it.
- Scaling the proportionsTwelve pounds of juice to sixteen pounds of sugar is three parts juice to four parts sugar by weight. For a household batch: 500 g strained juice to 665 g sugar. Weigh the juice — measuring it by volume will throw the ratio off.
- Citric acidTwo ounces to twelve pounds of liquid is roughly 1 percent by weight, about 5 g (a rounded teaspoon) per 500 g of juice. It is sold as sour salt in most supermarkets and is what keeps the syrup bright red and stops the sugar crystallising.
- FilteringA jelly bag, doubled muslin or a paper coffee filter, left to drip without squeezing. Forcing it pushes pectin and cherry solids through and the syrup will never clear.
- The brief boil is the hingeFour or five minutes at the boil, no more, and only after the sugar has been stirred into juice that is already hot, just short of boiling — the recipe treats the short boil itself as what incorporates the sugar. Longer boiling drives off the fresh cherry aroma and darkens the syrup, which is why the instruction is so emphatic.
- Bottling and keepingBottled cold and corked, this is not a canned product. Fill scrupulously clean bottles, refrigerate, and use within a few months; discard any bottle that fizzes, clouds or pushes its cork.
- Yield and useServe diluted — about one part syrup to five or six parts cold or sparkling water — or over ice cream and into soda.
Sciroppo di amarena belongs to a long Italian tradition of bottling summer fruit as a sweet concentrate to be diluted with cold water. The amarena or sour cherry has long been the preferred fruit for these syrups, its acidity working alongside the sugar that does most of the preserving; the citric acid here reinforces what the fruit already supplies. A short ferment before pressing belongs to older fruit-syrup practice — wild yeasts loosen the pulp so the press yields more — and it is largely absent from later syrup recipes.