Drinking summer

Recipe instructions revised December 2022 :-)

Pōhutukawa flowers are such an icon of New Zealand summer :-)

Over the past few weeks, more and more have come into flower around here.

  

I love the way they turn the footpaths red. 

  

But I had no idea they had culinary uses until I heard about pōhutukawa cordial on National Radio the other week.

I make elderflower cordial most summers: I had to try this new flower cordial!

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Most of the pōhutukawa I'd been seeing were on busy roads, but I started keeping an eye out for ones that wouldn't be tainted with car exhaust.

I found a few in Harbutt Reserve.  This one had a tūī singing away higher in the tree while I was picking flower heads :-)  It was fun seeing so many Kiwi classics close together, too, with the cabbage tree/tī kōuka and harakeke/flax next to the pōhutukawa.

A bit further along, in Phyllis reserve, there were a bunch of trees absolutely covered in flowers.

I quickly filled this bag, which is roughly A4 size, just by taking a small portion of the easy-to-reach flowers on four trees total.  If you're doing this yourself, notice that the flowers come on short grey stems which are then attached to more brown woody stems.  Try to break them off at the grey stem - it's much easier to break than the more woody bit.

 Every bright red stamen is topped with a little dot of yellow pollen.  My hands went a bit yellow during the picking!

Next to remove stamens from calyxes.  This turned out to be hugely time-consuming, but also necessary.  The man on the radio said the calyxes are bitter; I made a test batch with calyxes to check and unfortunately he was right...  I did discover, however, that the stamens are much easier to remove if you leave the flowers in the fridge for two days before processing.

The man on the radio was very vague with quantities, so I set to figuring it out.  I eventually settled on 6:4:3 packed stamens:water:sugar, plus 1 tsp citric acid per litre of water.  Boil the water, stir in the sugar and citric acid to dissolve, reboil, pour over the stamens and leave overnight.  If you don't have citric acid but do have a lemon tree, use 1/3 cup lemon juice instead, and reduce the water accordingly.

In the morning, strain off your gloriously red cordial :-)  The bottle on the right, below, is the cordial; the one on the left is pohutakawa flavoured water kefir (a fizzy drink, similar to ginger beer but made from bugs tolerant of a wide range of flavouring agents.  Water kefir is inherently yellow, hence the orange colour of the pohutakawa kefir).  It's really nice!

Here it is diluted simply with water. 

One of my test batches wasn't really strongly flavoured enough to make cordial - when I diluted it so it wasn't too sweet, it didn't taste of anything much.  What to do with something much too sweet?  Remembering how frozen sweet things always need to be way sweeter than room-temperature sweet things, I heated it, stirred in gelatine and made frozen jelly pops (at roughly the sugar/water/gelatine ratio I use for jelly tip slices).

They were nice!  I reckon pōhutukawa cordial would form the base on an excellent sorbet.

I don't know why pōhutukawa hasn't been 'discovered' as a native herb, as horopito and kawakawa have been.  They grow so abundantly, and it's amazingly yummy - rich and floral, with some of the tartness of the rosella hibiscus flowers found in so many herbal teas.  It does take forever to separate the stamens from the calyxes though, which would make it a pretty expensive commercial product, I guess.

If I have time before the season ends, I'd like to look into making 'pōhutukawa stamen water' - inspired by rose water and orange blossom water.  I think it'd be great anywhere those are used.  It'd be neat in gulab jamun or poured over a Middle Eastern cake - and it'd make really good Turkish Delight.  Not that I'm trying that last one - having looked at authentic Turkish Delight recipes off and on over the years, I'm pretty sure that's one thing I'll always be buying!

Recipe

• 6 cups (each cup lightly pressed down so it's really full) pōhutukawa stamens
• 4 cups boiling water
• 3 cups white sugar
• 1 tsp citric acid (you'll find that with spices in the supermarket) OR 1/3 cup lemon juice (and then only use 2 2/3 cups water)

1. Stir the sugar and citric acid into the boiling water and stir till dissolved.
2. Return the sugar water to the boil.
   
3. Pour over the stamens and leave to steep 24 hours.
4. Strain out the stamens (e.g. pour through a tea towel spread over a sieve, squeezing well to get out all the liquid).
5. Store in the fridge OR simmer 10 min then pour into sterilised bottles to store.
   

Gives around 5-6 cups.  Mix around 1:4 with water to serve.  Particularly good with sparkling water.