Apple and Lime Uzvar (Dried Fruit Infusion)
Just a few ingredients. Genuinely good for you. Kids love it. This tasty, wholesome drink is easy to make and calls for hardly any ingredients—and you can use what you have on hand (honey, dried apples). Both adults and kids will enjoy it.
Cooking method
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Step 1:
Gather everything on the ingredient list.
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Step 2:
Sort through the dried apples, rinse them, and put them in a pot or bowl. Bring 1.5 liters of water to a boil and pour it over the dried apples. Cover and let steep for 4 hours.
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Step 3:
After steeping, strain the apple infusion through cheesecloth or a fine sieve. Squeeze half a lime into the strained liquid. You can use half a lemon instead.
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Step 4:
Add the honey and stir well. I recommend adding honey while the uzvar is just warm—if you add it while it's hot, it loses all its beneficial properties.
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Step 5:
Your wholesome, tasty drink is ready. In winter and cold season it's best served warm; in summer you can chill it in the fridge and drink it as a refreshing cooler.
- Uzvar is a hot infusion of dried fruits and berries—a traditional drink that long served as the everyday alternative to tea in Eastern Europe. The most common versions were apple (from dried, fresh, or even soaked apples), cranberry, and lingonberry. A key feature is that it's made without sugar, sweetened only with liquid honey (crystallized honey works too, it just takes longer to dissolve). The honey goes into a warm, not hot, infusion so it keeps all its beneficial properties. Mint and other fragrant herbs are often added as well. For their nutrition and vitamin content, these infusions leave ordinary tea far behind, yet sadly they've been all but forgotten. For mine, I use the fruit I dry myself at the cottage—apples, prunes, sea buckthorn—or frozen berries (black currant, sea buckthorn, cranberry, lingonberry). My husband once bought me a great helper, a roomy food dehydrator, and we've been using it for years; now every winter we're set with our own fruit. Homegrown fruit is so much better than store-bought, where the apples are treated with who-knows-what. Of course, sometimes you still have to buy ingredients that don't grow in our climate. This version is a more modern take, since it includes lime (or lemon). I hope you'll enjoy both the recipe and the drink!
Caloric content of the products possible in the composition of the dish
- Honey - 400 kcal/100g
- Lime - 16 kcal/100g
- Water - 0 kcal/100g
- Dried apples - 231 kcal/100g
