Rose-Water
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the roses
Gather fresh roses in the morning after sunrise, in dry weather.
Remove the leaves from the roses and weigh them.
Combine the roses with 1 pint of water and a handful of coarse sea salt in a pan.
Let the mixture steep for 24 hours.
Distill
Fill the cucurbit two-thirds full.
Place a bed of straw at the bottom of the alembic.
Distill the mixture; the first four pints will be the best.
Use the remaining distillate to improve the quality of future batches.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Fresh pale single roses
- Provide the aromatic oils that give the distilled water its floral scent.
- Water
- Carries the rose aroma and carries it over into the distillate during heating.
- Coarse sea salt
- Helps draw aromatic compounds out of the petals during steeping.
The step that matters
Distill the mixture; the first four pints will be the best.. Aromatic compounds vaporise at different temperatures, so the earliest distillate carries the most fragrance. Collecting too late dilutes the rose scent with weaker, less pleasant fractions.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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