Strawberry Milk from Fresh Strawberries
Fresh Strawberry Milk
Today I want to show you how to make strawberry milk from fresh strawberries. I remember drinking the nestle strawberry milk made from syrup from my childhood, and I thought this stuff would be impossible to make, well, it turns out to be really simple. It almost tastes like one of those strawberry shortcake ice cream pops. The recipe is really just three ingredients. Most recipes I found online, said to heat the strawberries over the stovetop. This isn't the best idea, cooking strawberries not only changes the flavor but also leads to a browning due to complex enzymatic reactions. This will lead to strawberry milk with a pretty gross color, so I was able to work out a method that created a delicious strawberry milk with the proper pastel pink color.
Detailed Instructions:
Making the Simple Syrup
Now the first thing we are going to need to do is to make a simple syrup, this will not only sweeten the strawberry syrup but also allow us to maintain the proper color. To do this we need to add equal parts of sugar and water and heat it up the two until the sugar dissolves, I wasn’t exactly sure how much sugar I was going to need to sweeten the drink, so I went for overkill and added 150 grams of sugar and 150 grams of water. In the end, I ended up using only half of this, but if this still seems high to you now don’t worry the benefit of making the recipe this way is we can fine-tune how sweet we want the final syrup to be. Alright, keep heating this until we can clearly see that all the sugar is dissolved and then just set this off to the side to cool down while we prep the strawberries.
Extracting the Juice
So I am using about 1 pound or 450 grams of strawberries here, we need to hull them or essentially remove the core where the leaves are attached. After you have removed the leaves from each strawberry, cut it up into quarters, no need to be exact here. We will just need to repeat this process on all the strawberries, if you are feeling a little lazy you can also get by just removing the tips like this, although it does feel a little wasteful. Once we are done with getting the tops off each strawberry it’s time to work on getting the juice of these strawberries.
Do this we are going to want to crush the berries to release the juices. To do this, I am using a sieve over a bowl, and using my pestle to crush up the strawberries, a wooden spoon rolling pin would also help. We really just want to crush the berries and release the juice into the bowl below. To help facilitate the juice extraction we can add about a tablespoon of granulated sugar which will help extract and break the plant components that hold the juice in. This will take a few minutes, but after we are done, we should have over a cup of strawberry juice. Now an optional step if you have some cheesecloth or a finer sieve is to filter this juice to remove the seeds from this syrup. I didn’t have either at the moment, so my strawberry milk will have a little bit of a rustic character.
Alright, now it is time to add the simple syrup to the strawberry juice. I recommend adding the syrup a little bit by bit to ensure you don’t add too much. Now the syrup should taste very sweet on its own, so to gauge how much is a good amount you will have to add it to some milk. As a reference for my 1 and a quarter cup of strawberry juice, I used 75 mL or ⅓ of a cup of the simple syrup, which turned out to be half of the amount I made. Although your strawberries will have different sweetness, and what is good to me may not be to you, so it really is nice to play around to tune it to your tastes.
Finishing up
Ok so simply mix about 1 to 2 tablespoons of the strawberry syrup with a glass of milk and give it a stir. And that’s it! Obviously this stuff can also be used on ice cream or whatever else you want. I hope you enjoyed this quick video and I hope you all are well. Bai!
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Condensed Recipe:
Ingredients:
16 oz strawberries (450 grams)
1/2 cup water (75 grams)
1/2 cup sugar (75 grams )
Instructions:
Heat up water to and dissolve sugar to make a simple syrup.
Extract the juice by crusing the berries, this will break down the cell walls and release the juice. Collect the Juice.
Add collected juice to a cool simple syrup, adjusting for taste.
Mix 1-2 tablespoons of syrup per glass of milk
Enjoy!