Making Mulled Apple Juice for 100

Mulled Apple Juice

How have I ended up posting about how to make a mulled Christmas drinks for the masses again, this year?  When I left the residential life team in July this year, I thought that I’d also left my mass mulling days behind.  But apparently not.   I’m trying to remember the last time that I made a mulled concoction for like 4 (drinks with friends) or 10 (a gathering) or even 30 (a wee party)… I think that it was maybe 3 years ago for Cryfield Subwarden housewarming?

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Having peeled the first orange the traditional way and spent 10 minutes removing the pith from the peel, I decided to attack the next one with a knife.

 This time it was for our church’s annual Christmas Celebration.  Simon had asked me whether I wouldn’t mind being in charge of the catering side for the event.  He wanted to try out a different way of serving food at big events, so did I think that I could do a drink and some traditional english christmas goodies for 100 people within a $100 budget?  Well, it’s definitely a different scale from what I was used to at Warwick, but I took up the challenge.

Top tip: stick the cloves in the orange peel and then you won't have problems fishing them out later
Top tip: stick the cloves in the orange peel and then you won’t have problems fishing them out later

A bit of online research, excel spreadsheets and visits to various shops ensued and this is  the menu, that I came up with:

  • Mulled Apple Juice
  • Mince pies
  • Iced Christmas biscuits
  • Snow topped Spiced Cake.

The day before the big event, I hailed a tuk tuk and carted to the church:

  • 20 litres of apple juice
  • 12 oranges and some lime peel
  • 140 cloves
  • 80 pieces of cinnamon bark (my mum’s friend had kindly sent me cinnamon bark
  • 600g sugar
  • 1 very large sieve ladle

Unfortunately my pre-arranged mulling helper got the dates mixed up and forgot to turn up.  Just when I was wondering how I was going to make 20 litres of mulled apple juice with my poorly knee, help came in the form of various others who tasted, carried vast quantities of liquids, peeled oranges and decanted many cartons of apple juice.  What a Godsend! 2.5 hours later we were all done.

Mesa, can you see what's going in?
Mesa, can you see what’s going in?

 So, say you fancy mulling a non-alcoholic drink this christmas time.  Then, this one is a definite winner.  It went down really well at our Christmas Celebration tonight.  In fact, I had quite a few people asking me what the ingredients were but unfortunately I still have holes in my khmer vocabulary for words like cloves, cinnamon and peel.

I adapted the mulled apple juice recipe from BBC Good Food because it was the simplest and still garnered good reviews.  Most reviewers said that they didn’t bother adding in the sugar because it was already sweet enough.  It was sweet enough but slightly tart (which I like) for me when I tried it.  But my Khmer tasters said it was ‘jjoo’ (sour).  So, in went the sugar.

Here’s the recipe for mulled apple juice for 8 people, adapted from BBC Good Food.

Ingredients

  • 1 litre apple juice
  • peel of 1 orange
  • peel of 1 lime/lemon
  • 7 cloves
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • golden or white sugar to taste – for the khmer tastebuds, I added 2 tablespoons.

Top Tip: Stick the cloves into orange and lime peel.  That way, it’s really easy to fish out the cloves later and you won’t get unwelcome ones ending up in your drink.

Method

1. Stick the cloves into the orange and lime peel.  I used a knife to peel the fruit so that I could get as little of the bitter pith as possible.

2. Decant the apple juice into a pan, add in the orange and lime peels with the cloves, the cinnamon sticks and bring to a simmer on a medium to low heat.  Leave to simmer for 10 minutes.

3.  Sweeten, or not, according to taste.

Chakriya - one of my happy helpers
Chakriya – one of my happy helpers

Water Orange Cat, aka Lime Juice

Curious?

Before I left the UK, I was asked what I was most looking forward to eating in Cambodia.  The first thing that popped into my mind was a drink, lime juice.  I developed a liking for it on my first visit to Cambodia over 3 years ago and now I’m sort of addicted to it.

lime juice

That being the case, I guess it is quite fortuitous that my favourite Khmer word is the one for lime juice, which I learned on my second day here. Ttuk kreu’ik ch’mmaa.  Let me break it up for you:

Ttuk is the word that they use to describe water/liquid.

Lime is called kreu’ik ch’mmaa – orange cat. I think that most citrus produce is a type of ‘kreu’ik‘ – orange and they add a descriptive word after it in order to specify it. Limes get the description cat because the face you pull when you eat a lime, is like a cat. Apparently!  I’m only explaining the language.

Ttuk kreu’ik ch’mmaa.  Water orange cat.

Ingredients for making lime juice

It made me laugh – a lot!  I do love learning languages and there were two reasons why I was so keen to get stuck into learning the language when I arrived.  Of course, my main reason was simply to be able to communicate with people and get around.  Secondly, don’t you think that you learn so much about the culture from the language?  For example, one thing I’ve found out about Khmer is that they love to put words together to make up new words, like they do in German.   Then today, I learned that onions are, ‘k’tum barang‘ which translates literally as garlic french. It led me to ask my teacher whether onions were brought over by the French, and thus not native to Cambodia. He’s a 21 year old who isn’t as interested in food as I am. “Yes” he says slowly, not entirely sure why I am so interested in finding out about the history of onions.

the laborious part of making lime juice

Anyhow, back to ttuk kreu’ik ch’mmaa.  I especially loved Tuesdays and Fridays, when I was living with Simon and Becci because their househelper came round and made a big container of fresh lime juice and yummy food.  Not that Simon and Becci don’t make yummy food – it’s just… ugh… I’m digging myself into a hole.  So, anyways, Simon and Becci had taught her how to make the lime juice and I asked them to tell me.  Then on one bank holiday, I spent an hour making sugar syrup and squeezing the juice of 13 limes.  Perhaps I don’t work out enough, but I really felt it in my hands and arms the next day.

You can vary the amounts of the sugar and the limes, according to how you like your lime juice to taste.  I like it a bit on the tart side and not overly sweet.

cup of lime juice

Ingredients for homemade lime juice – this makes 2.4 litres

  • 200ml of freshly squeezed lime juice – about 8-11 limes, depending on the size of your limes
  • 225g white sugar – caster or granulated
  • 250ml water
  • more water – I make it in 2.4litre bottles (see step 2)

Method

Top tip: make the sugar syrup first so that it has a chance to cool down while you are squeezing the limes.

1. Add the sugar to the water in a saucepan.  Put the saucepan on a low heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved completely.

2. Once the sugar syrup has completely cooled, add the lime juice and pour into an empty container and dilute with water by filling the container to the top with water.

3. Serve poured over ice.

lime juice - ttuk kreuik chm'maa

Mulled Wine for 300


mulled wine syrup for 300

Mulled wine syrup for 300

For the past three years, we’ve put on a Winter Wonderland event for our Cryfield and Redfern students, with Christmas music, plenty mulled wine and mince pies to get them into the festive spirit. Of course, the first year we ran this, I realised how gauche I was about how one went around making mulled wine. My previous experiences of making mulled wine consisted of using a cheap bottle of red wine and dropping one of those mulled wine sachets into it. You know the kind I’m talking about right? The schwartz mulled wine spice bag.

So, that first year, I was marshalled into the mulled wine making army. We were inside this tiny kitchen, mixing vast quantities of homemade mulled wine syrup with bottles and bottles of red wine, adding sugar and dropping oranges into stock pots. Passing vats of the stuff outside to the thirsty punters, without making too much a mess, proved one step too far. Cleanliness was sacrificed for speed. I’m not sure that the redfern subwarden’s kitchen ever survived it.

It’s an understatement to say that it was somewhat of a revelation on how to make mulled wine. But you know what? That mulled wine tasted sweetly spiced wine with the tanginess of oranges, more akin to glühwein, and far superior than my previous homemade mulled wine. And that was even when we were doing it in bulk! The experience revolutionised my approach to making mulled wine.

The following year, I volunteered to make the mulled wine. A bit of research and arithmetic later, I began to compose my email to our deputy warden and organise my mulled wine making team.

Cha, Han-na
Actions
In response to the message from Border, Daniel, 21/11/2011
Sent Items
24 November 2011 00:45

Hi Dan,
I’ve put the costcutter order into one email.
I’ve gone for the Guardian’s mulled wine recipe – with a wee bit adaptation, think it’ll be tasty. –http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/dec/09/how-to-make-perfect-mulled-wine.
Chris and Dan – a few questions at the end which need your okaying to.

Here’s the mulled wine order for 300.

50 bottles of wine
25 oranges
25 lemons
4.5kg granulated sugar
8 jars of cinnamon sticks
2 jars of cloves
6 packets of whole star anise
3 jars of whole nutmeg
4 jars of whole cardamon pods

Hot chocolate order for 60:
12 litres of semi-skimmed milk
1200g hot chocolate powder

Pies and Biscuits:
300 mince pies (6×50 packets)
150 apple pies (6×25 packets)
2 packets of dark choc digestives
2 packets of milk choc digestives
3 packets of ginger nut biscuits
3 packets of bourbons

Could we have it ordered for Wednesday 30th November for 5pm pick up, rather than the Thursday and store it in Chris’s flat? Pinar said that she could store some of the milk in her fridge too.

If we have it on the Wednesday then Pinar and I can make the mulled wine syrup the night before, making it less stressful on the Thursday.

I’ll send an email to the wider group with an update and also request for manpower on the Wednesday, if Wednesday delivery is okay? Also have queries about urns/stock pans etc, which i’ll include in the email.

thanks,
Han-Na

For the next few days, I couldn’t quite get over the fact that I had ordered 50 bottles of wine!

Pinar and Rumana came round the evening before to make the mulled wine syrup with me, studding oranges with cloves, peeling lemons…

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2 hours and plenty of chatter later, we produced about 7.5 litres of mulled wine syrup. Later that night, I got the calculator out again to work out the mulled wine syrup to wine ratio.

This is what happened on the night.

cheeky Jueadding wine to the syrup

We had 47 bottles of red wine to mull and 2 hours to do it. I’d printed off the instructions in the morning and stuck it up on a cupboard.

For 500-550ml of mulled wine syrup, add 3 bottles of wine and 2 oranges. Heat it on a gentle heat so that all the alcohol doesn’t burn off. Empty the pan and start again 🙂

Rumana and Jue took charge of the mulling of the wine, whilst the rest of us began putting up decorations and heating up the pies. They were super-efficient and had it all done before 7pm before our first punters arrived. Shortly after the event began, I nipped off to a friend’s birthday party, confident that my job had been done.

laying out the mince piesmulled wine urns

I guess it’s becoming a tradition now to make the mulled wine from scratch for this annual event because this year I find that I’m initiating the new Cryfield team recruits into the art of making mulled wine syrup for the masses. We follow the success of last year and make the syrup a few nights before. Sarah needs a plaster when her finger exchanges sharp words with a vegetable peeler and Rumana shows off her skill for removing citrus peel. Glugs of orange juice and red wine are added into the pans by Dan. The good old calculator comes out as I work out the amount of spices that’s going into each stock pan and the ratio of syrup to wine when it comes to mulling.

But this time, it’s all happening out of my Redfern kitchen and I’m in charge of organising the whole event. What a difference a year makes!

So there you have it. Mulled wine for 300. Rather simple with a bit of organisation, preparation and a team of hardworking, happy helpers.