Lovage Spritzers
By: Jenny Richards
Published: Thursday, December 3, 2009 - 11:30pm

Ingredients




1 cup water
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup stems of lovage, sliced in ½"-1 inch pieces
Lemon juice (optional)

Preparation

1 Combine the sugar and water and heat until the sugar is dissolved. Then add the lovage and turn off the heat and allow it to steep until it reaches room temperature. This should make approximately 1 cup of lovage simple syrup. 2 Use 2 tablespoons syrup per 8 ounce glass of sparkling water.  Add a spritz of lemon juice and enjoy! 3 Note: The syrup will keep a long time, but it's best to strain the lovage out if you're going to keep it longer than a week. The longer the lovage is in the syrup, the stronger it will get.

About


We got the idea for these spritzers after a dinner at Monsoon. One of the salads featured candied lovage - and given how much lovage we have in our garden, we were curious what they were doing with it. We didn't order the salad that night - too much geoduck sashimi already - but I asked the waiter if he could snatch me a little taste so I could figure out what it was. He brought back a tiny bowl of lovage stems that had been soaked in simple syrup.
Our use of lovage has been limited to the leaves in things like stocks and roasted chickens - neither of us had ever thought to use the stems. We went home and made a simple syrup and soaked the stems in the syrup for about an hour (off the heat) and then added the syrup to a little sparkling water. It was cool and refreshing, and a nice change from Doc Brown's Cel-Ray soda!

Comments:
Melissa Peterman

Oh WOW! This looks incredible! Thank you for sharing Jenny!