Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Homemade Lychee with Sake


Homemade anything excites me.

The Husband is usually not very interested, much less keen, when I attempt to do some "homemade" stuff - like homemade achar, homemade vanilla extract, homemade pickled green chilli etc.

So I was really surprised when he suggested we make some homemade lychee with Chinese white liquor, or "bai jiu". Oh well, lychee is after all his favourite fruit..
We couldn't really find any Chinese white liquor at the first supermarket we went to.. So we decided to add a Japanese twist by using sake instead.

I now have 2 bottles of these sitting in my kitchen. The original recipe says to leave the Chinese white liquor and lychee for 3 months and then you'd get liquor with a strong infused taste of lychee.

I just realised that sake is not really an equivalent to "bai jiu". The Japanese equivalent should be "shoju". Chinese white liquor, or "bai jiu" usually has an alcohol content of around 30% - 40%. Japanese shoju has an alcohol content of around 20- 30%.

The sake we bought has an alcohol content of around 10%. I wonder if sake would work..

Oh well, we'd find out 3 months later!

2 comments:

JRBlack said...

how did it turn out?

I would think sake is too low of alcohol content, maybe it would go off. There is this special type of shochu here in japan, that I use for umeshu, and it is 35%. thinking about making a lychee one as well, with my leftover shochu...

Open Kitchen Concept said...

Hi JRBlack, you are right! It went off! I had to throw out both bottles.. very sad. I think that I should have used shochu or chinese white wine as well. Do try to make it with lychee and let me know how it turns out.. :)