Hey Rebecca, I asked about the simple syrup because I already had some in the fridge. There is a Ball recipe for pears that uses sugar and water to cook the pears in then cooks the syrup to use and adds alcohol. I thought I may be able to use what I had as the sugar water/syrup for cooking the pears.
Hm, I see... well, I would say two things: 1) I would def cook it down first to eliminate water, and 2) the sugar will invert during that time and the syrup will not be so simple anymore. I'm not sure how invert sugar works in preservation, maybe someone else can answer that. If I were you, I would just start clean with straight alcohol and dry sugar. It will give you a better end product and you can use the pear syrup for something else delicious!
One more thing (for now)! I like to do these alc/fruit/sugar jars at room temp, but I did have an issue with an exploding one over the summer that only had plums, grappa, and sugar in it. Especially if you wanted to do room temp, that's my concern about the extra water from the simple syrup; you want the alc concentration to be as high as possible. Not worth messing around imo!
Hi KIM-- Why do you want to use that instead of sugar? It will add water, which to me seems non-ideal for preserving. I do stone fruit in grappa or vodka with maybe 1/2 to 1 cup organic granulated cane sugar per liter of alcohol. Curious if there is some benefit to using simple syrup I haven't thought of, but my answer would be that it is not an improvement.
Also, in any case the ratio would depend on the proportion of sugar in your simple syrup; you'd want it as high as possible, but then ideal would just be pure sugar.
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