Yuzu sparkling water, three ways
The unsweetened infusion, the syrup, and the ratio that makes the finished drink.
In season: Fresh yuzu lands in the US October through December, mostly from small California growers, at a price per fruit that makes you careful with it. Bottled juice is available year-round and is the practical route for a drink.
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Infused, unsweetened
Use
Do not steep it. A fresh yuzu is mostly seed and peel and yields around 2 teaspoons of juice, and dropping that into a litre of water wastes the most expensive citrus in the store.
Method
Yuzu works as a dose. 1 to 2 teaspoons of bottled yuzu juice per 250ml glass, stirred into cold sparkling water with 1/2 teaspoon of simple syrup. If you have a fresh fruit in hand, the peel is what to spend it on: shave one strip and twist it over the glass, then put the rest of the fruit into the syrup below.
Time
No steep. This is a dosing ingredient.
Sparkling
Goes straight into sparkling water. Nothing has time to go flat because nothing sits.
Keeps
An opened bottle of yuzu juice holds about 6 months refrigerated and tastes dull after that. Fresh yuzu keeps 2 weeks in the crisper drawer.
The syrup
Ratio
Prepared yuzu to sugar, 1:1 by weight. Two fresh yuzu comes to roughly 150g once seeded, so 150g sugar.
Method
Wash and dry the fruit. Halve it, pick out every seed, julienne the peel thin and chop the flesh. Layer it with the sugar in a clean jar, seal, and leave it in the fridge, stirring once a day. It is ready when the sugar has fully dissolved into a loose marmalade, 5 to 7 days. Nothing is cooked at any point.
Yield
About 1.25 cups of loose marmalade syrup
Keeps
2 months refrigerated. It is brightest in the first week after the sugar finishes dissolving and stays good well past that.
Note
This is yuzu tea, yujacha in Korea and yuzu-cha in Japan, and it was a hot winter drink long before anyone poured it over ice. A heaped teaspoon in sparkling water is the best yuzu soda available to a home kitchen.
The finished soda
1 heaped teaspoon of the marmalade syrup per 250ml sparkling water over ice, stirred hard so the peel shreds distribute
Yuzu is aromatic more than it is sour. A few drops of lemon juice sharpens the edge without covering the smell.
The shrub version
1/4 cup yuzu juice with 1/2 cup honey and 1/4 cup rice vinegar, shaken cold and rested 3 days in the fridge. Rice vinegar is soft enough to stay out of the way of the aroma.
What doesn't work: Heating yuzu peel. Everything that makes yuzu recognisable is volatile oil sitting in the skin, and it goes up the extractor fan the moment the pot simmers. That is exactly why the traditional preparation is a cold cure in sugar over days. The second trap is on the label: a lot of the bottled yuzu juice in Asian groceries is salted, because it is packed for cooking, and salted juice in a sweet soda is a bad surprise at the first sip. Read the ingredients before you buy.
Goes with: GingerHoneydewCucumberLycheeMint