Beverage recipes sometimes call for “raspberry syrup,” a bright red, sugary syrup that gives a raspberry flavor and color to drinks. Why buy the bottled stuff when it’s so easy to make your own? Raspberries are in season right now, which means you’ll have all kinds of beautiful berries to choose from at the market. Plus, you’ll have the added benefit of knowing what went into your syrup– just three ingredients, all natural, nothing artificial. Homemade raspberry syrup can be added to beverages and cocktails to give them a strong, sweet raspberry flavor. Try flavoring lemonade with it to make raspberry lemonade or seltzer to make a raspberry Italian soda. It makes a lovely addition to cocktails and mocktails. Reduce it to a thicker consistency, and you can drizzle it on pancakes or waffles as an alternative to maple syrup. Yum!
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Homemade Raspberry Syrup
Ingredients
- 2 pounds raspberries
- 1 quart water (4 cups)
- 2 cups sugar
NOTES
Instructions
- Rinse the raspberries clean.
- Place the raspberries in a medium saucepan.
- Cover with water and bring to a boil. Reduce to a medium simmer and let the raspberries cook for about 20 minutes. Skim any foam that rises to the top.
- After about 20 minutes, the raspberries will have lost most of their color and the water should be deep pink/red in color. Remove from heat. Strain the raspberry liquid through a fine mesh strainer into another clean pot, separating the solid berries from the liquid. DO NOT press down on the solids to extract more juice; it's tempting, but doing this will make your raspberry syrup cloudy.
- Once the raspberry liquid has been strained, discard the solid berries. Add 2 cups of sugar to the raspberry liquid. Bring back to a boil, stirring frequently to dissolve the sugar into the syrup. Let the syrup simmer for 5 minutes till the sugar is completely dissolved, skimming any additional foam that rises to the top.
- Remove from heat and allow to cool completely. Pour into a glass container, seal, and refrigerate. The syrup should last for several weeks.
Nutrition
To get the juice from black raspberries, a centrifuge works best. It does not crush and break the seeds as a twin-roller juicer will, making the juice bitter. A jelly bag won’t work, either, because black raspberry juice has fiber that will clog a cloth hang bag. The juice will mold before a hang bag will work. A centrifuge with a fine-mesh nylon filter, processing one cup of carefully-mashed/muddled berries at a time (no broken seeds), will do the job in five minutes without cooking, without jamming the seeds into the centrifuge basket pores. The cooking method described here would dilute the juice. The flavor is much more intense if the juice is not diluted. I haven’t seen a KitchenAid Mixer Juicer Attachment with a low-pulp screen, so I don’t know if it would break the seeds; must look for one of those.
I found this back in June, after I could no longer get the Vanilla-Raspberry Energy Drink made by Campbell’s, and was getting a bit desperate! It was my absolute FAVORITE flavor, and it gave me the extra boost of energy I needed around noon each day. I have made this several times now, with NO problems at all. Since I was after the FLAVOR more so than a thick syrup, the results I obtained work quite well — and I made sure to cook it long enough to get a good heavy pink/red color. I also made some basic vanilla syrup to go with it. So with green tea as a carrier, I have the Vanilla-Raspberry flavor back! YEAH! Kudos to you Tori for coming up with this! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
Very happy you recaptured that delicious flavor, Marie!
I’m back making this recipe for the second time. It has been perfect for waffles, crepes and pancakes. I boiled it a few extra minutes to thicken it more and the flavor, color, clarity, and mouth-feel are outstanding. Mic Fleming below in the comments is right on the money in praising the careful direction Tori gives in making this recipe. It was perfect on the first try. Well done! Love it!
The best tasting raspberry syrup I’ve had! My whole family loved it on top of cheescake!
I made a half batch of this syrup specifically to blend in a Knickerbocker cocktail. Perfect! But I’m posting now to praise the clarity of the instructions and helpfulness of the photos and step-by-step hand holding (e.g. do not press down on the fruit in the straining). I’m a pretty confident home cook, but I really wish more recipes were written with such care for a first outing. Brava!
As a quick follow-up to my post praising the recipe. No, as bad as my lock down fever is, I’m not mixing cocktails at 1:39 am. I’m on Eastern European time where it’s just before noon. 🙂
So glad that it was helpful!
I agree!!!
Can this be used in the same way the commercial Kedem Raspberry Syrup is used? I.e. a small amount added to a glass of water?
Yes! For sure.
Mine never thickened up 🙁
I cooked extra as advised but it’s just juice. Sadly.
That’s strange. Are you sure you had the liquid amounts correct? Did you use real sugar or a sugar substitute? If you used something other than sugar, it generally won’t thicken the same way it would with real sugar.
Can it be frozen?
My childhood neighbors were Swiss and they made this every summer – this recipe really brought back the memories – thanks!
My 15 y/o son made this with frozen black raspberries that we had from the garden. The syrup was gorgeous bright red and it tastes wonderful. We added it to homemade lemonade to make a bright red raspberry lemonade that looked like cherry koolaid and tasted delicious. With black raspberries, the resulting pulp was still bright red and I didn’t want to waste it so I used it to make black raspberry brandy and black raspberry liqueur (steep it with brandy or with vodka and sugar, shaking often, for about a month and strain). That’s still brewing but I know from experience it will be great, as we have dozens of homemade liqueurs we’ve made with foraged and garden fruit that we’ve done that way. 🙂 This definitely is too thin for something like pancakes and my kids want to do that with it next so we’ll try cooking it down. Thanks for the great recipe!
Thank you for the recipe. I had picked a bunch of raspberries after a day of heavy rain and they were flavorless. Making this syrup was a great way to make good use of them, because the cooking concentrated the flavor.
I used the KitchenAid Mixer Juicer Attachment with the low pulp screen to remove a lot of seeds, and then poured the liquid through a metal mesh sieve to get the rest. Very happy with the results. To serve, I put some in a glass with ice then added club soda for fizz. My husband liked it too. Simple yet tasty!
Can we freeze this instead of canning?