Grape Squash / Grape Juice Syrup

The number of juice recipes on my blog shows up how hot it is at Chennai. My intake has been 75% of liquid food and 25% of solid food. I hardly feel like eating anything and just don't like to feed on hot stuff at all :(

Moreover spending long hours in the kitchen is like burning one alive(that sounds a little harsh though :P). But yes!! it has been extremely exhausting to do anything at all when the heat reaches upto 40°C at day. Hence you can quite expect such chill and refreshing juices from my blog :)

Its so good to have a mom who holds a BSc Home science degree. She knows how to make squashes and is an expert at it too :) This time I took up her recipe book and tried it all by myself to make our family favorite grape squash. It came out so well that my mom was praising me for my effort :) :)

Ingredients:

Grape extract - 1 ltr
Sugar - 2 kgs
Citric acid - 2 tsp
Tonovin (Grape essence) - 4 tsp
Water - 1 ltr
Sodium Benzoate - 1 tsp

Method:

To make grape extract:

Choose well ripen black grapes.

Remove stems and wash them thoroughly.

Take the grapes in a large vessel and add one cup of water(from the 1 ltr water) to it and boil it until the fruits get cooked. While its boiling, keep crushing the grapes with a masher until it is thoroughly juicy. Strain the extract and collect the juice.

Measure the juice now and proceed with proportioning the other ingredients accordingly.

Method to make squash:

Take the sugar, citric acid and water in a pan and heat it until the sugar dissolves and it bubbles up.

Allow this sugar syrup to come to room temperature and then mix up the above made grape extract to it. Now add the Tonovin to it and mix well.

Take a tsp of warm water and dissolve the Sodium Benzoate(preservative) in it. Add it to the squash and mix it up.

Now pour the squash into a sterilized bottle and store in refrigerator :)

To serve, fill 1/3 of serving glass with the grape squash and remaining by water. Mix up well and serve chill topped with ice cubes. :)

Tips:

Black grapes with seeds or Paneer grapes are apt and cost effective for making this squash.

To get a pulpy texture to your grape juice, use a large holed sieve to strain the grape extract. We do this since we like our juice to have a puply sediment :)

The method of making other fruit squashes are the same.

Hence I have put down the measurements of ingredients for various fruits :)

The measurements would yield 2 ltrs of each fruit squash.