Subsequently, I promised myself to plant more mint so I had enough to harvest to make my own mint sauce. Today, with three thriving pots of mint around the garden, I harvested most of the stems and made sauce. Here's how.
Cut and wash your mint, shake it dry.
Pluck leaves from the stems, discarding any blemished ones.
Roughly chop the mint; it doesn't need to be too finely chopped.
I ended up with two cups of moderately firmly packed chopped mint.
For each cup of mint you need:
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
1 cup vinegar
I decided to use two separate saucepans and combine one cup of mint with brown sugar and balsamic vinegar and the other with castor sugar and white wine vinegar. Malt vinegar, as is used in most commercial products, contains gluten so is not suitable if you want a gluten-free product.
Combine sugar and water and bring to the boil while stirring. Keep at a rolling simmer for a few minutes. Add vinegar and mint and return mixture to the boil. Boil for a minute, then remove from heat. Leave to stand for five minutes before pouring into clean bottles. I used bottles from bought salad dressing, which I save for this and similar purposes.
In the end, I had enough sauce for one bottle each of mint sauce and balsamic mint sauce. There was a little of each sauce left so I combined them in a separate bottle, which gave me half a bottle of the combo.
You could get by with less mint, say 2/3 of a cup instead of a full cup, but I like to really taste the mint.
The mint in the pots will regrow and later in the summer I'll be able to make some more sauce. Maybe next winter I won't run out.
