Increasingly, my interest for living a zero waste lifestyle has grown. In a bid to reach that goal, I’ve looked at how I can reduce waste in different aspects of my life, starting with my kitchen. While cooking, there are a number of food scraps that often end up in the bin. Now, instead of discarding these scraps, I view it as an opportunity for a culinary adventure to experiment with new recipes. I have made delicious meals from roasting squash seeds, turning carrot tops into chimichurri and simmering Parmesan rinds in soups.
After reading the book, “Cooking with Scraps” by Lindsay-Jean Hard, I took inspiration from her method of using uneaten apple cores to reduce food wastage in my own kitchen. While she recommends using them to make a syrup for pancakes, my preference for using simple syrup in cocktail drinks motivated me to repurpose the apple cores into drinks.
A year-round fruit, apple makes delicious syrup any time of the year. This syrup would pair particularly well with summer fruits like blackberries or cherries, especially for a refreshing smash-style cocktail.
In enhancing the flavor of my apple core simple syrup, I utilized two other ingredients that have synergy with apple: floral cardamom and sweet-spicy crystalized ginger. This addition gave a pleasing flavor to the syrup.
The apple core simple syrup I make is sweet with a hint of apple essence and uses water, sugar, apple cores, cardamom pods, and crystalized ginger as ingredients.
While it is true that apple cores contain amygdalin which becomes cyanide when metabolized, there’s no need to fear; the heat from cooking destroys the cyanide compound, making it perfectly safe for consumption.
I store my apple cores in a freezer-safe bag in the freezer until needed for syrup preparation. You can also store apple peels left over from other baking activities where the peel is discarded.
For a thicker syrup, an extra 1/2 cup of sugar compared to water gives a consistency more like maple syrup. This would be perfect for pancake or waffles topping.
The apple core simple syrup flavor can be adjusted to one’s taste with spices like cinnamon sticks, whole allspice, black peppercorns, bay leaves, thyme sprigs or even additions like bourbon to the water for a caramel-like flavor.
The syrup makes for a wonderful cocktail mixer when combined with spirits like bourbon and rum. The addition of something acidic and fun like lemon or orange juice, or flavored bitters could make some interesting cocktail experiments.
The syrup can be stored in a sealed glass jar in the fridge for up to one month.
