Pomegranate molasses - anyone make it at home? Tips?

Cooking Discussions Cooking, Cookbooks, Ingredients
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Serious Eats says reduce 4 cups down to 2/3 of a cup. No lemon juice or sugar added.

Simply recipes says reduce 4 cups, with 2 Tbs lemon juice plus 1/4 cup of sugar, down to 1.25 cups (give or take). The juice and sugar combined don’t bring 2/3 of a Serious Eats cup up to 1.25 Simply Recipe’s cups.

If anyone makes this themselves and have guidance, it’d be appreciated. (I usually just buy the stuff but that store’s a hike, and last minute decided I wanted a salad with a pom molasses & vinegar dressing tonight)

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Are you using commercial juice or juicing a pomegranate?

I’ve been enjoying green salads with a ton of fresh pomegranate arils added, with an evoo- white balsamic dressing lately.

I love fresh pomegranate and I like pomegranate molasses on lamb. I don’t really like bottled Pom juice.

What I’ve been substituting for pomegranate juice or pom molasses, lately, is concentrated sour cherry juice.

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I have a pomegranate balsamic vinegar in my pantry I bought a million years ago I barely ever use. Maybe I should :thinking:

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I could have sworn there was a discussion of this already, but it must have been on chowhound related to a cookbook or dish of the month.

Most pom molasses one finds commonly have sugar added, but when I went to a turkish market, I found some more expensive brands that had only 1 ingredient: pomegranate juice.

So I would say reduce the juice without adding anything, and adjust the sugar & lemon juice / vinegar directly in the dressing.

You can always add sweetness and acidity to taste in the dish, but you can’t take them out once they’re already in the reduction.

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Commercial, the Pom-Wonderful brand. It was (surprisingly) the cheapest per ounce of the 3 that I had available at my usual grocer.

I actually thought hard about buying and concentrating the sour cherry. I use it a lot in my home-made kombucha. But I wanted to go with something I knew this time (guests over for dinner).

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I’ve never had a combo like that, but my go-to so far has been Nagi’s at RTI (hers uses red wine vinegar).

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Perfect, and thanks. My empty bottle of molasses is just that - pom juice.

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I thought it would be a great pairing with either of my toasted nut oils (walnut & hazelnut). But now I bought a pear/white balsamic I need to try with those first :crazy_face:

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I buy the sour cherry concentrate. I’m sure there’s an American one near you.

This is my local one.

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@linguafood - I can go down a dressings rabbit hole pretty fast, even though I’m not too much of a salad guy (as shown by my infrequent visits to your daily salad thread). My MIL was a master salad maker. I used to send out her recipes to coworkers in need. Me, I’m not so good. But I really like the dressings.

@Phoenikia - I haven’t seen the cherry concentrate here (but I mainly frequent one store), just the regular unsweetened juice. But that’s good enough for my kombucha. I may have bragged about this before, but my cost per 20 oz bottle is $0.39 vs about $4/bottle in the store. It doesn’t matter that much now that the kids are grown, but at one point when they were drinking 4x4 bottles a day, it was kind of a big deal.

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And I’m a huge salad gal (even tho that is not a thread I started, surprisingly :wink:), so I have a good selection of oils & vinegars to choose from any given day.

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Oh, I thought it was yours, although now I don’t know why.

This is tonight’s salad

although I’m making certain adjustments. Three kinds of tom, more cuke by ratio than it calls for, orange bell (because no one here likes green), and the molasses dressing instead of the called-for lime. And I’m adding (at the very end, gently folded in) a diced avocado.

Can I follow a recipe? Nope. But seriously, the first time I did follow it, and it’s really good as writ. I just can’t not tinker with shit.

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Probably bc I have a salad every day, as evidenced in our WFD threads :slight_smile:

I don’t think I’ve ever followed a recipe for a salad in my life.

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I used pom molasses most often for turkish kisr (bulgur salad), fattoush, and muhammara (might be my favorite use).

If you’re looking for ideas, the pom molasses thread has lots of them. Fesenjan / fesenjoon (chicken stewed in pom molasses and walnuts) might be the most popular.The famous Zahav lamb is another.

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Thanks, I’d not seen that thread before; it predates my arrival here by a bit but has lots of great ideas.

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This US company has some great fruit juice concentrates, including sour cherry and pomegranate:

https://www.fruitfast.com/fruitconcentrates.

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@Saregama - the above got to bugging me as I thought about it, and turns out I was wrong. I was over near that store this morning so I took a quick detour and grabbed a bottle.

That brand of pom molasses (a Lebanese brand called Cortas Kitchens) has a lot of added sugar in it. A serving size of 1 Tbs has 14 grams of sugar, 6 of which are added sugars.

It’s also a lot thinner than the stuff I made yesterday, although the density differences are minor (mine is about 8% denser).

On the plus side, it was $7/675g bottle (17 fluid ounces). To make 17 ounces and using the SE version (4 C juice = 2/3 cup finished) I’d have needed about $27 worth of the Pom Wonderful juice.

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Thanks. I just checked their prices and they’re pretty good. Not as cheap as the sugar-laden stuff I just bought, but it’s just pure concentrate at about the same price, shipped, as an equivalent amount of the pom juice (using sugar content per serving to calculate, each cup of concentrate would have been about 4.3 cups of juice).

Too bad I’d have to order 5 quarts to get the free shipping! Maybe I can get some friends to join in…

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I’ll find the bottle later and take a pic for you.

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@CCE Here it is - Nare
The other one I use is Al wadi, which has sugar added.

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