Sangria

Rather than have two blogs I'm absorbing Cooking with Charles into Thinking with Charles. This blog exists for me to write about whatever. Sometimes I want to write about food, but probably not often enough to maintain an additional space to do so. You'll also notice that old Cooking with Charles posts have been imported here.

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One of my goals for this summer is to figure out how to make a good sangria. I perused several recipes online until I found one I liked the look of, though I did not adhere to it particularly closely. Here's the recipe I used, which is a half batch due to the size of my pitcher. To use the whole bottle of wine, double this.

1/2 lemon, sliced 1/2 lime, sliced 1 orange, sliced 1/2 pear, diced 1/4 c sugar 1/4 c triple sec 3/4 c spiced rum 1/2 bottle dry red wine

As the recipe recommends, I let the fruit and sugar sit in the rum and triple sec for a few hours before adding the wine. I mad to mush the fruit down a little bit to get it all to be covered. Before serving I poured in the wine and stirred it up. I did not serve it over ice, though all of the ingredients were cold.

When I fished out a piece of pear later in the evening it wasn't particularly boozy so I don't know that letting the fruit sit in the rum had much of an effect. In the future I'll probably just combine all of the ingredients at the same time then let it sit for at least an afternoon, maybe overnight, to really let the flavors blend.

I used the sugar because it appears in most recipes but I don't think it belongs. Most of it did not even dissolve (you can see it at the bottom of the pitcher) but the drink was plenty sweet. It's hard to tell how sweet it would have been had I followed the recipe more closely; I left out the orange juice but did use triple sec which is very sweet.

This drink was good, but I intend to experiment more with sangrias this summer to really get a feel for them. There are a lot of potential ingredients -- fruits, beverages, herbs, and so on -- to try out. At the very least I'd like to have in my repertoire a good recipe for red wine and another for white.

UPDATE: After drinking the first batch (short work with so many helpers) I repeated this with the second half of the bottle. I used the same recipe, minus the sugar, and reused the same fruit. All ingredients were added at once. The mix sat in the fridge for about 24 hours before being tasted. The sangria itself was about the same -- still plenty sweet -- and the pear chunks were very boozy and delicious.