Apple-Ginger Shrub

"You had me at the words, 'drinking vinegar,'" I sad to my client, who had just told me about shrubs, the delicious combination of (usually) fruit, sugar and vinegar. this was about a month ago.
Fast-forward to COVID-19, social distancing, getting furloughed from my non-essential job and safer-at-home directives from local officials. A friend of mine was posting about the cocktails they made with shrub and I was like, "I know what I'm doing with my life now!" I remembered the fermented apples I had made back in December, just sitting in my fridge. Next, I read a few recipes.

They all seemed to pretty much say the same thing but in a slightly different order. Who knows if I'm even doing this right, but whatever, it tastes good. They all pretty much said you need equal parts water, sugar and vinegar, and the amount of fruit varied from about the same volume as one of the other parts to about twice the volume. It's my opinion that the make channels their inner Italian grandmother and just do what their intuition tells them to do, and to taste test often throughout the process.

Here's what I did:

• 4 apples
• 2-3 Tbsp ginger paste (you can also use ginger juice)
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup sugar
• a little extra honey I found in the cabinet and needed to use (~1 Tbsp.)
• 1 cup raw apple cider vinegar

1. Cut the apples up into 1/4 inch chunks. We need lots of surface area. 
2. Toss them in sugar and throw them into a mason jar
3. Wait 2-5 days. you'll notice the juices being pulled out of the apples and collecting in the jar. We want that to happen.
4. Drain off the syrup out of the mason jar and keep it. this is the tasty fruit infusion for your shrub! You can keep the apple chunks in the refrigerator and make something out of them later. Sometimes I'll just heat up some of the fermented apples and top them with coconut milk and cinnamon for a dessert.
5. Mix the ginger paste into the syrup
6. Mix the syrup with the vinegar and taste test it. If it tastes too sweet, add more vinegar. If it's too sour, add more sugar, or better yet use erythritol or monk fruit to keep the sugar content lower.
7. Bottle it up and keep it in the refrigerator. I have no idea how long to tell you it keeps for, but if you make a tasty cocktail with it on the reg, you'll use it before it goes bad! Honestly, it should keep pretty long, seeing that the acidity is high because of the vinegar.

How to drink shrubs

Not that I'm an expert on shrubs, but here's what I have learned. 

• Cocktails
• Mocktails
• Drizzle over ice cream
• Sip them

Easy Mocktail Recipe

• 2-3 Tbsp shrubs (Sometimes I mix 2 kinds, today was apple-ginger shrub with fennel shrub)
• 6-10 oz water (sparkling or still)
• Ice
• Garnish