Gorse Rum | Foraging | VEG HACKS

Hi there, welcome to today's Veg Hack. Today we're going to be looking at gorse bushes and we're going to be using the lovely flowers from them to make gorse rum. We like to use a lot of foraged ingredients in the field kitchen and gorse is one of my absolute favourites, particularly in gorse rum as it brings forward the lovely coconut, almond, floral, tropical flavours of it and makes this delicious drink. Gorse is a perennial plant which means you can pick it year round. It's most abundant in the spring but even in the winter you can find it mainly on moorlands and along the coastline. You've probably seen it up and down the motorway, wouldn't recommend picking it from there. So it's a wonderful easy to spot plant and it's fairly easy to pick but you've got to mind your fingers because it's got some really spiny leaves on it so you've got to be a little bit brave when you're grabbing it. When picking this we're going to want maybe about four handfuls of it. From the very edge of the plant you want to pick the nice open flowers and the closed ones and none of the ones that look a bit dead and just be very very careful as you're grabbing it. Here's the load that I picked yesterday and it's been given a good wash and just stored in a fridge overnight. We're just going to put it straight into our jar and like I said we need about four good handfuls of it so you're probably going to be out picking for a little while now. To the jar we're going to add the zest of an orange and the zest of a lemon and we're also going to add about two maybe three teaspoons of sugar just to add flavour. Next we're going to add some white rum to it and the reason you want to use white rum is because it's got a nice clean flavour so it's going to carry the gorse flowers really nicely. If you use a darker rum it can be a bit heavy-handed and overwhelm the flavours. Just want to give it a quick stir just to make sure the sugar is nice and dissolved. Pop the lid on it and store it in a nice cool dark place for about 24 hours overnight and then you're just going to strain it through some muslin and bottle it. Here's one that I made the other day. As you can see it's gone this lovely golden olive oily kind of colour and when you smell it, oh you can just, it smells perfect. It's got this real nice coconut almond floral note. The flavour of the gorse will have come through perfectly and what we're going to do is we're going to make a really simple cocktail that I've invented. I call it a stormy coastline. It's kind of a riff on the dark and stormy which is rum and ginger ale but I'm going to be using fresh ginger, fresh lemon and soda water. Grab a heavy bottomed glass and into it put about half an inch of fresh peeled and sliced ginger and about a quarter of a lemon. You just want a teaspoon of sugar and then you want to get either a muddler if you've got one at home, if you don't then a rolling pin or a pestle from your pestle and mortar will do just fine and just using quite firm downward presses and a twist of the wrist you just want to release all the juice and all the oils from the lemon and all the flavour from the ginger and make sure that your sugar is nice and dissolved. From there you want to take about a double shot of your gorse rum and add plenty of ice. You want to get it nice and chilled so add ice right the way up to the top of your glass and grabbing a spoon you just want to give it a real quick stir so make sure that all your flavours are nice incorporated, the sugar is dissolved and you've taken on all the flavours in your glass and then from there you just want to top it up with a little bit of soda water and there you go and oh it tastes amazing. So you've got really nice gentle ginger flavour, you've got the lovely fresh lemon and you've got the delicious floral notes of your gorse rum coming through. I really hope you enjoyed today's Veg Hack and I really recommend you to try it at home because you're going to end up with an absolutely delicious drink and if there's anything else you want to see us do just leave a comment. Don't forget to like and subscribe and hit the notification bell for more Veg Hacks.