Wassail Recipe
Ingredients
1 gal apple juice
2 oranges
2 lemons
1 lime
1 tbsp cloves
1 tbsp allspice
2 cinnamon sticks
1 qt water
1 cup sugar
Hi, I’m Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village.com, and today we are going to show you how to make some wassail, and this is an old English festive yuletide kind of drink, and it is made to be drunk warm, actually like cider, and there is actually going to be a cider element in this recipe. So to start with, actually, behind me in my stock pot I’ve got a quart of water on a boil, so it is waiting to be infused with all these delicious flavors that we are going to start with first here. I’ve got a tablespoon of all spice, a tablespoon of whole cloves. I’ve got 2 whole cinnamon sticks, 2 oranges, 2 lemons and 1 lime. What we are going to do with these citrus guys is simply cut all of these in half, and we are going to squeeze the juice from them into the ramekins that I have here, and what we are going to do is just throw in the hulls into the water that we have going behind us so that we can infuse that water with these citrus flavors and let it bring to a simmer before we actually add the apple juice element and the apple cider. We’ve juiced all our lemons, limes and oranges, so we are just going to throw all the hulls into the pot here because we want to infuse this water with all the citrus and the zest that comes out of these when you boil them. We will be taking them out of there later. I’ve got a tablespoon full of all-spice, and it’s the whole all-spice not the ground because we want to keep it in whole pieces so it can float around. I’ve got a tablespoon of cloves as well that we are throwing in and 2 sticks of cinnamon. We’ll probably bring it to a boil first for about a couple of minutes and let it simmer for about another 35 or 40, and then we will come back and show you the rest of the procedure for wassail.
All right so we are back with the wassail and we’ve actually finished the first stage, and I’ve removed the oranges, lemons and the limes. I got this out with the strainer, and as you can see, I also strained out the cinnamon sticks and the all-spice and the cloves. At this point, we are actually going to put in the apple juice and cider for now. Most people will use just a whole gallon of apple juice as we have here. I am going to use 2 parts of apple juice and 1 part cider, and we are going to put that into our stock pot, and I’ll probably throw in the cinnamon sticks right afterwards. We will let that come to a boil. So now that we’ve gotten a light boil actually. I’ve cranked the fire down to low so that we can get a simmer, and what I am going to add now are the actual juices from the citrus that we threw in the first part of the recipe, which is lime juice, lemon juice and orange juice. So we are going to go ahead and drop those in. Now, last but not least, we have our sugar, and we are going to go ahead and just drizzle this in, and I’ve got a full cup of granulated sugar that is going into this. So these are the final ingredients. Now that we’ve added the sugar and the citrus juices, we just need to let this simmer on, just a slow simmer actually a general simmer for 15 minutes, and we will actually be ready to serve.
All right so we are back with the completed wassail recipe, and we are going to go ahead and take the stock pot off the stove, so everything is dissolved and incorporated in here. As you can see, there is a gentle steam coming off of this, and it is about the same temperature that you would consume a hot tea actually. So we will go ahead and ladle some out. We are going to use a glass cup here, so you can get an idea of what this is going to look like. We wish you could smell it in the video. Now we are ready for some cold-weather caroling, and there is some homemade wassail to warm your bones.
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