I don’t know about you, but where I live there’s a few weeks every year where it’s unbearably hot. Which is why my girl Tieghan at Half Baked Harvest is a god-send for creating this delicious Peach Thmye Rosé Slushy. This wine recipe works like air conditioning but with rosé so it’s much, much better. It’s also fantastic because it has us making our own cocktail syrup, which has quickly become one of my favorite ways to concentrate flavors in a cocktail.
And I’m not alone in that. According to the Apartment Bartender columnist, Elliot Clark, “making your own syrups at home is one of the easiest and best ways to infuse more flavor into your cocktails…Fruit syrups. Tea Syrups. Spiced syrups. The possibilities for what you can make are endless.” The tradition of adding sugars and syrups to drinks goes all the way back to the 1800s when Harry Croswell first defined a cocktail as the combination of “spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.”
There are about 9 million different types of cocktail syrups, but here are a bit of the basics:
The main types of cocktail syrups are Simple Syrup, Rich Simple Syrup, Demerara Syrup, Gum or Gomme Syrup, and Syrup Infusions like what we have in this recipe. Simple Syrup you’re probably already familiar with. It’s a blend of white granulated sugar and water. As you might already have guessed, Rich Simple Syrup is just its more concentrated cousin. Demerara Syrup is made with demerara sugar which is similar to brown sugar, but, Clark notes with “really nice toffee and caramel notes” that make it the perfect companion to aged spirits. Gum or Gomme Syrup has been around since the 1800s. As Derrick Schommer writes in Sugar in Cocktails, The History, “Gum syrup is similar to a rich simple syrup but has one additional component: gum arabic. Gum Arabic adds a silky smooth texture to your syrup and gives cocktails a smooth texture on the palate.” Lastly, syrup infusions are the combination of sugar and a flavoring agent like what we did in this recipe with some sugar, peaches, and thyme.
Personally, I highly recommend you make a little bit extra of the Peach, Honey, and Thyme Syrup in this recipe to save for other future wine cocktails. It’s truly just that good! Plus making syrups does take some time and patience so having them prepared ahead of time is definitely ‘the move!’
To make Half Baked Harvest’s Frozen Peach Rosé Slushy, you’ll need:
- 1 ripe peach, sliced
- 2-4 tablespoons honey or sugar (I used honey)
- 2-3 fresh thyme sprigs
- 2 cans of Lazy River Rosé (equivalent to 1 bottle)
- 4 cups frozen peach slices
You’ll start by tossing together the ripe peach, honey, thyme, and ¾ cup water into a pan and letting it simmer. The hardest part of this recipe is patiently cooking the syrup and then, even more patiently, waiting for the syrup to cool down so you can toss it into a blender with the remaining ingredients. I was drooling over my pan and counting down every minute but I promise you it’s worth the wait.