Roselle Drink (洛神花茶）

We visited Desaru Fruit Farm last week (will post photos from the trip in a separate post) and were intrigued by the many benefits of consuming roselle plant which our guide was explaining. As the fruit is not expensive (1kg at RM6), we bought a kg of roselle from the farm's store to try.

Roselle plant - picture taken from my previous Kluang trip as I realised we had forgotten to take photo of the Roselle plants in Desaru Fruit Farm, must have been too engrossed listening!


The roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa, known in Chinese as 洛神花) is a species of Hibiscus used for the production of bast fibre and as an infusion.The flowers are 8–10 cm in diameter, white to pale yellow with a dark red spot at the base of each petal, and have a stout fleshy calyx at the base, fleshy and bright red as the fruit matures. 

Roselle Fruit

The plant is considered to have anti-hypertensive properties. Roselle has been used in folk medicine as a diuretic, mild laxative, and treatment for cardiac and nerve diseases and cancer. Roselle calyces are also harvested fresh to produce pro-health drink due to high contents of vitamin C and anthocyanins. It is also believed Roselle drink helps to reduce cholesterol.

above extracted and summarised from Wikipedia.

Well, the fruits have been sitting on the table top for the past 2 days as I was not in the mood to make the Roselle drink with my back pain still haunting me. Dear Hubby decided to help yesterday as he didn't want the fruits to dry up.

This is the fruit of his labour, the drink does really tastes like Ribena, sweet and tangy and full of berry taste. And we're happy as its completely homemade and free of additives and preservatives!

Roselle drink

Ingredients

Roselle calyces (the red "petals") from 500g of Roselle Fruit, discard the seed pods
about 2L of water (this gives a mild drink that is not too tart)
Sugar to taste

Method

Wash the Roselle calyces thoroughly, boil it in water for 10-15min. Add sugar to taste. Best served chilled.