Hot Karin and Honey Drink for Sore Throats

    I found these strange fruit at the grocery store on sale in a small bundle of 3 for under 300 yen. I never heard of karin fruit before but it turns out it is a common fruit in this area and usually is harvested at the beginning of winter. As it turns out the most common thing to make with this fruit is a liqueur or fruit infused sake which isn't really that interesting for my family. Since it take months for this drink to become something delicious and I'm the only person in my household that drinks (and not that often at that), I instead scoured the internet for weeks looking for something else. Maybe a healthier, more shareable or useful recipe was out there. Finally I happened upon a recipe filled post on NPR from 2009 and settled on a couple of things I could do with the fruit that I had. The first one that seemed like a very good winter beverage, so I proceeded to the boiled sore throat remedy first.

    Each fruit was about the size of a small mango but more yellow in color. The texture was harder than an apple and peeling the slightly waxy peel off with an apple peeler was a bit challenging. For the drink, you need peel and the seeds, but make sure to remove the seeds from the seed pods. Remove all the seeds and skin from the meat of the fruit and leave that aside.



    Following the directions on the website mentioned above, I boiled the skins and seeds, remembering eventually to take out the seeds from the seed pods. The point of this beverage is to use the natural coating of the seeds to make a drink that will instead coat your throat. I think this would have gone better if I had thoroughly washed the outside of the peel first. Because I did not, the resulting beverage was not terribly delicious.

    After boiling for long enough that the fluid level has decreased by about half, something I measured with end of my spoon, strain it and keep the resulting fluid.

The recipe suggests that you mix that with honey while it's still warm so that it can mix together thoroughly. As I'm not overly fond of honey is raw form (when it's baked into something else, it doesn't really bother me, but something about honey when it's just honey unsettles my stomach) I added honey just to one hot cup of the beverage and did not enjoy the outcome. I then added a little bit of sugar, the same amount that one might add to a cup of coffee, and found it significantly more palatable but my stomach stayed in an awkward place for the rest of the evening. My throat did not become sore though.

    As a sore throat remedy, and if you very much like honey, this might be the right beverage for you.

    In a few days, I plan to try my remaining liquid, which is stored in a mason jar in my fridge for now. If it upsets my stomach again, I will dispose of the rest of it.