Sangria Slushy

May 17, 2011

Due to a miscalculation regarding how much wine sixty people would drink at our seders we ended up with quite a few bottles of open wine leftover. I used some of the red wine to make sangria to serve for Shabbat dinner but there was a lot of white wine leftover that needed to be used before it went bad. My first thought was to try making wine flavored marshmallows, but with all the pesach cooking I didn’t have the time so I decided to make white wine granita instead. I looked at a couple of recipes and they all used a combination of wine, sugar and citrus so I decided to use lemon to go with the wine.

With all of the alcohol and sugar this granita doesn’t freeze as hard as a traditional granita. This makes it incredibly easy to make, because there is no need to mix and scrape the mixture while it is freezing. Simply pour it into the pan and freeze it until it is solid. When it first comes out of freezer it is firm enough to scrape into crystals, but it melts fairly quickly and takes on the consistency of a slushy. It tasted very much like sangria with the combination of sweet citrus and wine. Therefore I decided that instead of calling it White Wine Granita it would be more fitting to call it a Sangria Slushy. This would be the perfect grown-up treat to serve on a hot summer day. Cool and refreshing, but with just enough of a kick to keep things interesting.

 

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Ingredients & Quantities

1 (750 ml) bottle dry white wine 1 cup sugar 2 lemons

Cooking Instructions

Zest the lemons and place the lemon zest in a medium saucepan. Juice them and add the juice to the pan with the zest. Add the wine and the sugar and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring to make sure the sugar is dissolved. Boil for one minute. Remove the mixture from the heat and pour into a 9 x 13 pan. Let cool to room temperature, then freeze until solid.

Remove the mixture from the freezer and use a fork to rake it into crystals. Serve immediately.

6 Comments

  1. Brilliant! Great idea for using up wine. The mixture reminds me of a poaching liquid for pears. I wonder if you could use this twice: once for poaching fruit (peaches, maybe?) and then use the poaching liquid to make the slushy?

    • What a great idea to use this as a poaching liquid first before freezing it! The added flavor from the poached fruit would be delicious. It might freeze harder, though, because some of the alcohol will cook out. I would check on it while it was freezing and scrape the ice crystals with a fork, like in standard granita recipes, if it seemed to be getting hard. If you make it let us know how it comes out!

  2. Wait a minute … wine goes bad? 😉 Seriously, I’ve kept wine for a week or two in the fridge. It might not be drinkable, but it’s still cookable. I use it as wine vinegar in recipes.

  3. Strangest thing. I sat at our seder, drinking the very Sprite-like Muscato by Bartenura and declared it would make a good sorbet. I haven’t yet give it a shot, but had been wondering about how well the wine would freeze. Thanks for the knowledge.

    • The alcohol content in the Muscato means it won’t freeze hard enough to be a sorbet, but I imagine it would be nice frozen into a slushy like in this recipe. It probably wouldn’t need the extra sugar, though. Next time I have leftover Muscato I’ll try freezing it and see what happens.

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