Vinegar allows you to make a soda with fruit, without it being cloyingly sweet. With this cucumber mint soda, first you make a simple syrup with water, sugar, and vinegar. Then you infuse the vinegar simple syrup with fresh mint leaves. To make the soda, you pour the syrup over ice and chopped cucumber and add seltzer water. Easy! If you are not familiar with shrubs, the whole vinegar concept can seem a bit unusual. But believe me, it works! I made a batch of this the other day for some friends and they’ve all been begging for the recipe. It’s wonderfully refreshing on a hot summer day. Many thanks to Payam Fardanesh of Silk Road Soda for introducing me to the whole concept of vinegar-based sodas, and in particular this cucumber mint combo. It’s my favorite flavor of all of his sodas, and is a classic Persian drink. This particular recipe is adapted from a recipe for Sekanjebeen, a mint vinegar syrup, from the Persian cookbook Pomegranates and Roses, by Ariana Bundy. Serve immediately, garnished with a sprig of mint, if you’d like.
